David Stryker’s Successfully Litigious Year

David Stryker was in his office in the Huntsman Corp.’s corporate headquarters in The Woodlands in August 2016 when he got the call. Huntsman had spent $1.1 billion nearly two years earlier to buy a company that had touted its wondrous pigments technology.Huntsman considered that technology the “crown jewel” of the acquisition. It promised dependability.It promised to save money.It promised, essentially, to bring home to the United States, a means to escape China’s hold on raw materials for pigments Huntsman needed. And to escape the high prices China could charge.But the call to David Stryker in 2016 threatened all that.The pigments process Huntsman was buying from Rockwood Holdings, and all its promised benefits for Huntsman’s industrial products, did not work.It never would.Stryker, Huntsman’s executive vice president, general counsel and secretary, hurried seven doors down the hall to break the news to his boss, Peter Huntsman. Then he called Kirkland partner Eugene Assaf, who was nearly 2,000 miles away vacationing on Nantucket Island. Less than 24 hours later Assaf was flying to Houston.Assaf and Stryker had a lawsuit to file.Kirkland filed it for Huntsman in New York in February 2017.For more than four intense years Huntsman’s lawyers fought to prove their fraud…