As every litigator knows, evidence almost always tells a story that is untidy and riddled with loose ends. This was illustrated by a recent innocent landowner case in California — Coppola v. Smith. There, a company had purchased land in 1995 without knowledge that it had been contaminated with perchloroethylene (PCE) from a dry cleaning operation in the 1950s and 1960s. When the company was sued under contribution by a nearby dry cleaner for contributing PCE to to regional groundwater contamination, … More