Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
A year or so ago, former U.S. District Judge Alan Albright realized he was ready to make the next — likely the final — move in his long career in the world of patent and intellectual property litigation.
“I started really missing being a trial lawyer and the practice,” Albright told The Texas Lawbook in an interview Tuesday. “I’d watch during trials and lawyers would do something, and I would be old and grumpy and I would text my clerks: ‘They should have done this,’ or ‘That’s stupid.’”
In a series this week, The Texas Lawbook dives into the Texas Business Courts’ first two years of operation and what changes may come during the next legislative session.
A jury in Houston will decide whether deposition video and production company SmartDisk is owed about $6.4 million in breach of contract damages or if its former business partner, Lexitas, properly terminated the parties’ agreement and owes nothing.
Alan Albright was appointed to the federal bench in 2018 and quickly implemented local rules and procedures that turned his courtroom into a preferred venue for patent disputes. He stepped down from the role last month.
ONEOK announced that it received a minority investment of $9 billion from private equity firm Apollo. The Tulsa midstream company also said it has acquired the Permian Basin natural gas assets of private Fort Worth-based Brazos Midstream for $4.4 billion cash. Latham and Akin advised on the deal.
Houston-based global giant SLB has acquired Kelvion, a German thermal management and heat exchange technology company, from Apollo for $3.4 billion cash and about $700 million of debt. Sidley Austin advised Apollo with an international team led from London. Paul Weiss was regulatory counsel to the PE firm.
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, we detail a brawl that took place in the sixth-floor library of the Bob Casey Federal Courthouse in Houston, Deloitte agrees to pay $21.5 million to resolve an employment discrimination case in Dallas, and Texas reaches a settlement with Meta that will total about $1 billion.
A nine-year fight to recover a judgment that now exceeds $40 million from a Dallas private equity firm entered a new chapter Friday, when SunTx Capital Management was named in a lawsuit and accused of violating the Texas Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act.
The NCAA just paid $2.8 billion to settle a dispute about college athletes’ rights to share in revenue generated by their sports, effectively conceding that the relationship between schools and athletes is heavily economic and not purely educational. This appears to be another key step to resolving an increasingly disputed question in college athletics: Are college athletes employees?
This is Part One of a series examining the legal battles that are reshaping college sports.
Kirkland & Ellis announced this morning that Prerak “Pre” Shah, a former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, has joined its Houston office as a partner to focus on state attorneys general litigation.
Shah, who worked a year in the Texas attorney general’s office in 2016, told The Texas Lawbook that he lateraled to Kirkland because it “has an unmatched litigation platform, an exceptional client base and a real appetite for investing in areas where clients are facing growing risk.”
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