Sprenger was the lead attorney in Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Company, the case featured in the 2005 film North Country. The suit was filed in 1988, and was resolved 11 years later. It was the first sexual-harassment class-action suit in the country. Sprenger won the case. His Washington, D.C., firm also sued the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein in Hill v. Republic of Iraq (2000) and Vine v. Republic of Iraq (2003), known collectively as the “Human Shield” case.
“What I learned is that the hardest thing to do is to get the judge to give you a trial date. They say, ‘I’m busy for the next year.’ So, when the judge calls out your name, you say, ‘I’ll be there!’ Judge James Rosenbaum in the Jenson case said one day, ‘I’ll give you two weeks in February but you have to go to Duluth.’ I said, ‘I’ll be there!’
The other thing I learned was to keep your cases short. We filed the Human Shield case in 2001 and collected the money in less than a year. Everyone thought that, with 150 plaintiffs—all Americans who were used as human shields in the first Gulf War in the early ’90s—it would take months and months of work. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson said, ‘In the next two years, I’ve only got two weeks I could slate for this trial, and that was the next month. We said, ‘We’ll be there.’ Showing up is 90 percent of being a trial lawyer; never whining being the other 10 percent.
The other thing I learned in the Jenson case that I applied in the Human Shield case is that you should never, ever give up. Judge Jackson awarded a $193 million judgment, and we had to then find Saddam Hussein’s assets. At the time, there was no Iraqi government other than Saddam, so the judgment was against him. There was half a billion dollars of Iraqi cash in the U.S., but several billion [was] owed to creditors. We had to fight a lot of other creditors against Saddam to get those assets.”
