The Southern District of Texas ranks second in a Lex Machina report released Thursday that examines which venues handled the greatest number of tort cases between 2022 and 2024.
Only the Southern District of Mississippi, where lawyers have filed more than 2,000 lawsuits against a trio of defendants based on allegations of lead in the drinking water in Jackson, Mississippi, saw more tort suits filed during that time. Over the two-year time period, the Southern District of Mississippi handled 5.7 percent of all federal tort cases (2,829) while the Southern District of Texas handled 5.2 percent (2,554).
So, what’s driving the numbers in the Southern District of Texas? It’s not natural disasters like hurricanes or man-made ones like the occasional explosion at a petrochemical plant.
“The Southern District of Texas is a busy court in many of our practice areas, and so it is not a surprise that they would be busy with a lot of tort cases,” said Ron Porter, Lex Machina’s torts practice area lead, in an interview with The Lawbook. “And that is primarily not driven by any one particular kind of case … it’s just a lot of bread-and-butter premises liability and automobile liability cases in particular that drive a lot of the tort case numbers there.”
“Overall, it’s just a function of the fact that there are a lot of people in the Southern District of Texas and it’s a busy court.”
Adam Masarek, a Lex Machina practice area specialist, added that litigation stemming from offshore oil and gas activities and cruise ship activities could also explain the Southern District of Texas’ ranking.
Considering that two districts within the jurisdiction of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit took the top two spots, it’s no surprise that court heard more appeals in tort cases than any other circuit — 19.1 percent of the total federal tort appeals nationwide. Many of the tort appeals that end up in the Fifth Circuit stem from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, according to the Lex Machina report.
When the data is examined on a per-judge basis, eight of the Top 10 district judges handling the most tort cases are within the Fifth Circuit and three are in Texas. The 10 district court judges handling the most tort cases are:
- Judge Carlton W. Reeves of the Southern District of Mississippi (2,263 cases)
- Judge Charles R. Breyer of the Northern District of California (308 cases)
- Judge Thomas W. Thrash Jr. of the Northern District of Georgia (251 cases)
- Judge Carl J. Barbier of the Eastern District of Louisiana (248 cases)
- Judge James D. Cain Jr. of the Western District of Louisiana (231 cases)
- Judge Michael Truncale of the Eastern District of Texas (221 cases)
- Judge Lee Rosenthal of the Southern District of Texas (219 cases)
- Judge Shelly Deckert Dick of the Middle District of Louisiana (217 cases)
- Judge Keith P. Ellison of the Southern District of Texas (215 cases)
- Judge John deGravelles of the Middle District of Louisiana (213 cases)
A dive into the data shows there isn’t a specific kind of case or event triggering the tort traffic for the judges in Texas, Porter said.
“Judge Truncale has 24 cases in his court that are part of an MDL dealing with hotel industry sex trafficking litigation, so that accounts for some of the cases there,” he said. “But other than that, there really isn’t one case or type of case or incident that you can point to as responsible for the number of case filings in those courts.”
The report also examined the volume of tort cases on a per-law firm basis. Only one Texas-based law firm cracked the Top 10 for most active firms representing plaintiffs in tort cases between 2022 and 2024. It wasn’t the TV lawyer who hollers about taking a hammer to reckless 18-wheeler drivers, and it wasn’t the other TV lawyer who promises to take insurance companies to “pound town.”
The law firm of Thomas J. Henry ranked 10th on the list of most active firms, with a total of 186 tort cases filed in federal court between 2022 and 2024. The report also broke down the most active law firms representing plaintiffs specifically in Federal Tort Claims Act cases during that time period, and Thomas J. Henry was once again the only Texas-based firm to make the list — the firm represented 16 plaintiffs in such cases between 2022 and 2024, earning a ranking of seventh nationally.
“He has appeared before,” Porter said of Henry. “Looking back at the 2023 tort litigation report, he was in the top list in that report that covered litigation from 2020 through 2022.”
Messages seeking an interview with Henry were not returned Thursday.
