Lauralene Butler Jackson, 84, was alone in her Arlington home in mid-February 2021 when an Arctic blast named by the Weather Channel sent temperatures into single digits and deposited frozen precipitation across Texas for four days.
The electricity went out and stayed out for days. Jackson died from hyperthermia Feb. 16. Her daughters and grandchildren sued Oncor Electric Delivery, Vistra Corp., NRG Energy and Calpine, claiming their corporate gross negligence and intentional decision-making — not Winter Storm Uri — caused their mother’s death.
Jackson’s name is now at the top of literally hundreds and hundreds of court documents in the Texas civil justice system as a lead plaintiff for 31,600 Texas residents and business owners who have sued more than 220 energy companies for damages related to the storm. The Jackson family is among the 246 wrongful death cases. Tens of thousands of other Texans claim the power outages caused them serious medical injuries. And thousands of Texas businesses and homeowners say the energy companies owe them billions of dollars for property damages.
Yet, as Texans approach the fifth anniversary of the deadliest winter storm to ever hit the state, not a single one of those lawsuits has made it to trial. In fact, no trial dates have even been set. Not a single witness deposition has been taken.
Instead, the Texas courts — especially the Texas Supreme Court and the First Court of Appeals in Houston — have issued rulings that either eliminated the rights of those victims to have their day in court or severely restricted the arguments that they will be able to present if any of their cases actually do make it to trial, according to lawyers following the litigation.
And many legal experts now predict that none of those cases will ever make it to trial.
“The only thing colder than the temperature during the Uri storm is the reception courts have given litigation arising from it,” said Dallas trial lawyer Jeff Tillotson. “Instead, courts turned up the heat on plaintiffs. Facing head winds from the Supreme Court, plaintiffs have made little progress in their cases.”
Meanwhile, the energy companies involved have so far paid hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees to scores and scores of the most prominent, experienced and expensive lawyers in Texas who are zealously fighting the lawsuits at every turn, claiming that they are frivolous and arguing that they should never be allowed go to trial.
Lawyers representing the individuals and Texas businesses say the problem isn’t that they are not being allowed to score big verdicts for their clients, but that the Texas courts are preventing their clients from even having a chance to come to bat.
“It is a sad day for normal Texans that they are not being allowed to have their day in court,” said Houston lawyer Derek Potts. “But maybe we should not be surprised that the Texas courts are protecting the energy companies. It is a pretty depressing situation for our clients.”
The lawsuits claim that the widespread power outages during the storm were caused by the energy companies’ corporate gross negligence by failing to winterize their operations, by failing to warn their customers of potential power outages and by intentional decision-making that caused the electric failures that led to the deaths of 246 people, including Jackson.
The energy companies “deliberately chose not to have adequate plans and systems in place to respond to the weather conditions during Uri” and “failed to learn earlier failures” and failed to make improvements recommended a decade earlier by federal regulators, according to Dallas lawyer Ann Saucer, a partner at Nachawati Law Group.
“Defendants’ failures to plan and prepare caused cascading systems failures and widespread blackouts,” Saucer wrote in an amended complaint filed in January. “Because of these failures, millions were forced to endure days-long blackouts in freezing cold weather. People died as a result. Millions more endured traumatic hardship short of death.”
Saucer argues in court documents that the utilities decided where to cut power, favored some neighborhoods over others, intentionally took steps that made the power shortage worse, ignored numerous warnings to better winterize their systems and lied to their customers about the seriousness of the storm as it approached.
Lawyers for the energy companies have achieved extraordinary legal success so far by making multiple legal arguments, including: Winter Storm Uri was so massive and devastating that the damage it caused could never have been prevented and that Republican-led energy deregulation several years ago meant that the energy companies no longer have a contractual relationship with their customers and thus no legal duty to them.
“This was an unprecedented storm that was responsible for the damage and now unprecedented theories of liability by plaintiff’s lawyers in pursuing these cases,” said Jackson Walker partner Tré Fischer, who serves as the primary liaison counsel for the defendants.
The 31,600 Winter Storm Uri-related wrongful death, personal injury and property damage cases across Texas were consolidated by the Texas Supreme Court into a single multidistrict litigation handled by former Harris County District Judge Sylvia Matthews. The judge divided the litigation into three categories by business sectors: natural gas, power generators and transmission and distribution utilities.
Starting in 2023, the courts began rejecting elements of the cases brought by storm victims.
Judge Matthews dismissed the cases against the natural gas companies, such as Anadarko, Apache, Atmos, Comstock and Energy Transfer, because their conduct was too disconnected from impacting the customers in 2023, but she allowed the lawsuits against the power generators and TDUs move forward. Six months later, a divided Texas Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, for the first time ever that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas is actually a government agency and thus immune from civil lawsuits.
Then, in December 2023, the First Court of Appeals in Houston ruled that the lawsuits against large power generators such as Luminant, NRG, Calpine, Exelon and Sempra Energy had “no basis in law or fact.” That case is on appeal to the Texas Supreme Court.
In a highly unusual twist, 1,304 insurance companies have joined their old nemeses, plaintiff’s lawyers, to sue the energy companies on behalf of their 287,000 Texas customers, alleging the evidence shows that the power generators were partially or even mostly at fault for some of the power failures that caused so many deaths and injuries. The insurance companies want the energy companies to reimburse them for claims paid to homeowners.
“Their negligent acts and omissions directly resulted in grid failure,” former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman, who is representing the insurance companies, wrote in a court document filed last week. “Their acts extended far beyond mere breaches of contractual duties, rising to willful interruption of service which undermined the entire grid integrity and resulted in a public calamity that cannot be endured.”
The Jackson family’s case against Oncor and the other TDUs is now back before Judge Matthews, but lawyers for the energy companies say they are planning yet another appeal. That will add another two years to the litigation battle before any trials could even start, and that is assuming the energy companies lose.
Mikal Watts, a lawyer representing 6,000 of the storm victims, said the decisions by the Texas Supreme Court and the lower courts “do not reflect well on the Texas tort system.”
“By immunizing these energy companies, the Texas Supreme Court is almost guaranteeing that this will happen again and again,” Watts said. “It is incredibly disappointing that the Texans most victimized by the actions of these companies may never get to show a jury the evidence in this case.”
Bonanza for Lawyers
The amount of high-profile lawyers in this litigation is astounding.
The number of lawyers representing the 31,600 plaintiffs, 1,304 insurance companies and more than 220 energy companies has now exceeded 430, according to court records.
Nearly 125 of those attorneys were involved in the Winter Storm Uri-related corporate bankruptcies of Brazos Electric Cooperative, Griddy Energy, Just Energy and the Ector County Energy Center. Dozens more represented clients in breach-of-contract disputes between the power and natural gas companies.
But the large majority of the 430 attorneys are involved in the multidistrict litigation in Houston.
In a 2025 interview with The Texas Lawbook, Fischer said that “the sheer size of the MDL presents coordination challenges.”
“We’ve been able to streamline our efforts and leverage the diverse expertise of our combined team to present a coordinated and compelling defense focused on our strategic objectives,” Fischer said. “The litigation has followed its logical course. We raised significant legal challenges early, and these are now being addressed through the appellate process. It’s not unusual for complex cases to involve extensive motion practice and appeals before reaching the discovery phase.”
The Texas Civil Justice League, a business advocacy organization, argued in an amicus brief filed in November that the Texas Supreme Court should dismiss the lawsuits because a $10 billion court victory for the plaintiffs would see the wealth “shift from the 23 million Texans … to the thousands of plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit” and “to the lawyers representing those plaintiffs who stand to recover a few billion for themselves.”
Court records show that 120 trial lawyers from across Texas — including legal superstars such as Potts, Mikal Watts, Greg Cox, Eric Rhine, Ann Saucer, Jason Itkin, Bill Robins, Brent Coon and Larry Taylor — are representing the 30,000 individuals and small business owners.
But the lawyers for the plaintiffs will be paid nothing if they don’t win damage verdicts for their clients because they have been hired on a contingency fee basis.
By contrast, the Winter Storm Uri litigation has already been such a financial bonanza for the corporate law firms representing the energy companies that the Texas Civil Justice League wants the Texas Supreme Court to declare the winner without any trials taking place.
Recognizing the potential for billions of dollars in civil liabilities, energy company defendants such as Oncor, Luminant, CenterPoint, NRG and Calpine tossed budgets aside and hired the most successful and most expensive members of the corporate litigation defense bar, including Allyson Ho and Mike Raiff of Gibson Dunn in Dallas, Anna Rotman of Kirkland & Ellis, Macey Reasoner Stokes of Baker Botts, former Houston judge Pat Mizell of Vinson & Elkins and Susman Godfrey partners Barry Barnett and Vineet Bhatia of Houston — all superstar lawyers whose rates range from $1,500 to $2,700 an hour.
Other corporate law firms hired by the various energy companies in Winter Storm Uri matters include Bracewell, Foley & Lardner, Haynes Boone, Hicks Thomas, Jackson Walker, King & Spalding, Morgan Lewis, Norton Rose Fulbright, O’Melveny & Myers, Quinn Emanuel and Yetter Coleman. Lawyers at these firms bill clients from $700 an hour for their most-junior associates to as much as $2,150 for top partners.
Legal industry analysts working exclusively with The Lawbook estimate that the energy companies, insurance companies and other businesses involved in various aspects of Winter Storm Uri litigation have paid their outside counsel between $400 million and $480 million for legal work done over the past five years.
