San Juan Scandal: ‘Climate Nuisance’ Crusaders Caught Filing Plagiarized Lawsuit
"An astonishing example of plagiarism," federal judge declares.
If you need further proof that lawyers who sue oil companies for climate change are unscrupulous crusaders, a scandal unfolding in Puerto Rico provides it in spades. Legal Newsline reported on April 11 that a federal judge just blasted the attorney representing the capital city of San Juan in a climate lawsuit, highlighting what she called “an astonishing example of plagiarism.”
U.S. District Judge Aida M. Delgado-Colon proposed $7,000 in sanctions (potentially with further punishment to follow) against David Efron, a local personal-injury attorney hired by San Juan to pursue legal action against major oil companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron. The lawsuit, filed in 2023, sought damages for climate change-related impacts, but the judge found that Efron’s 241-page legal filing was a near-verbatim copy of a class action suit filed by 40 other Puerto Rican municipalities in 2022.
“Copycat filings”
The original class action, drafted by lawyers from Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman and Smouse & Mason, targeted the same oil companies, alleging their role in exacerbating climate change through greenhouse gas emissions. San Juan, for reasons Judge Delgado-Colon described as “unknown,” opted to file its own separate lawsuit a year later, hiring Efron to lead the effort.
However, instead of crafting an original complaint tailored to San Juan’s specific circumstances, Efron copied entire passages from the earlier class action, presenting them as his own work. The judge noted that “...San Juan’s complaint is a poorly plagiarized version of the complaint in the Municipalities’ Case.” She added that:
“From early on in this case, the defendants have pointed to substantial similarities between many of the filings made by San Juan here and those filed by the plaintiffs in the Municipalities’ case. Despite being on notice of defendants’ plagiarism accusations at almost every step of the way, San Juan did not respond to these allegations in any meaningful way.”
The judge’s order documented multiple examples of blatant plagiarism, right down to the same typos contained in the copied text from the original brief (p 14):
Judge Delgado-Colon emphasized that such conduct undermines the integrity of the legal process, wastes judicial resources and disrespects the opposing parties who must respond to the duplicated claims. We will add that it underscores the moral bankruptcy driving all the climate nuisance litigation.
The climate nuisance scam
As Firebreak has reported previously, the San Juan case is part of a broader wave of climate litigation that has swept across the US in recent years. Municipalities, states and NGOs have increasingly turned to the courts to punish fossil fuel companies for the alleged impacts of climate change. These lawsuits dubiously argue that energy firms engaged in deceptive practices by downplaying the risks of climate change while continuing to profit from fossil fuel production. This is the much-touted “Exxon Knew” campaign, which we dismantled here.
In Puerto Rico, the 2022 class action by 40 municipalities sought to pool resources and present a unified front against the energy industry, making San Juan’s decision to file a separate, plagiarized lawsuit all the more perplexing. But this ethical slip is not an isolated incident in the realm of questionable climate litigation. Over the past decade, similar lawsuits have faced scrutiny for various reasons, including questions of jurisdiction.
For example, in July 2024, a Baltimore judge dismissed a climate lawsuit against the energy industry, ruling that such claims were beyond the purview of state courts. Similarly, in January 2025, a New York judge tossed out New York City’s climate case against oil companies, marking the third state court to reject such claims at an early stage. These dismissals highlight the legal challenges facing climate nuisance lawsuits, which often struggle to establish a causal link between a company’s actions and specific climate-related damages.
Scandal upon scandal
While the San Juan plagiarism scandal raises further questions about the integrity of the attorneys involved, Efron isn’t the only bad actor here; lawyers for Sher Edling, the foundation-funded activist firm leading the nuisance crusade, were also just caught plagiarizing filings in a copycat suit brought on Rhode Island’s behalf.
The obvious follow-up question: how could plaintiffs accusing the energy sector of dishonesty be so blatantly dishonest? The answer is that these nuisance cases, often (and wrongly) framed as noble efforts to hold powerful corporations accountable, are opportunistic, poorly constructed, and driven by motives unrelated to justice or environmental protection. As further evidence, we even caught one attorney general–Dana Nessel in Michigan–effectively outsourcing her state’s suit to Sher Edling, where we also noted that briefs were clearly copy-pasted from one case to another.
If the attorneys behind San Juan’s lawsuit truly believed in the city’s unique grievances, they would have crafted an original, airtight complaint tailored to its specific circumstances. Instead, they resorted to copying someone else’s work (who in turn copied someone else’s work). That’s because the whole enterprise is a rotten mixture of ideological zeal and rank opportunism—a chance to punish “Big Oil” and land a big payday, while garnering favorable coverage from the same news outlets that sell their climate reporting to the highest bidder.
Judge Delgado-Colon noted that Efron was so inattentive that he couldn’t even bother to respond to emails from the defendants’ lawyers in a timely manner. “I’m in a jury trial in federal court,” he wrote in one delayed reply. “Give me a break.” The takeaway? Mitigating climate change isn’t the goal; the point is to bankrupt the oil industry, apparently with as little work as possible.
A costly distraction
Bottom line: the plagiarism in San Juan’s climate lawsuit is a symptom of a larger problem—the moral bankruptcy of climate nuisance lawsuits. These cases masquerade as principled stands against corporate malfeasance, but their reliance on ethical shortcuts, financial opportunism, and fabricated legal theories reveals a lack of integrity.
Rather than advancing environmentalism, they waste judicial resources, undermine public trust, and distract from more effective solutions. Nuclear power is carbon-free, after all. The San Juan scandal should serve as yet another wake-up call. Lawyers can’t save us from global warming.