AZA Team Slaps Down ‘Frivolous’ Anti-SLAPP Appeal
Calling the appeal of a construction dispute "a poster child" for abuse of the interlocutory appellate process, the 14th Court of Appeals sent the case back to a Houston district court for trial.
Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
Bruce Tomaso spent more than 30 years as a writer and editor at The Dallas Morning News. When asked what positions he held there, he usually says it’s easier to list those he didn’t.
As enterprise editor on The News’s breaking news desk in the summer of 2016, he played a key role in covering the downtown shooting spree that left five police officers dead. For its coverage, The News was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Reporting.
He spent most of 1997 in Denver covering the federal criminal trials of Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Four years later, he covered McVeigh’s execution.
His first major reporting assignment for The Texas Lawbook was a retrospective on the 20th anniversary of the $119.6 million verdict for 10 young men who’d been molested as children by Rudy Kos, a priest in the Catholic Diocese of Dallas. The stories earned Bruce and his Lawbook editor, Allen Pusey, the Dallas Bar Association’s 2018 Stephen Philbin Award for Feature Writing.
In 2019, he covered the seven-week medical fraud trial of nine physicians, healthcare executives and others associated with Forest Park Medical Center, a now-defunct Dallas surgical hospital.
He’s a member of the Alumni Hall of Fame at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He and his wife, Dallas attorney Patricia A. Nolan, have one grown son, who is smarter than either of them.
He will drop everything, including preposterous sums of money, to see Lady Gaga, Notre Dame football, or the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team.
You can reach Bruce at bruce.tomaso@texaslawbook.net.
Calling the appeal of a construction dispute "a poster child" for abuse of the interlocutory appellate process, the 14th Court of Appeals sent the case back to a Houston district court for trial.
Less than three months after their indictment, 11 Texans, including two doctors, have pleaded guilty in a payoff scheme involving needless lab tests billed to Medicare and other federal programs by three Dallas-area labs.
Tom Melsheimer, who represented DaVita Inc.’s former CEO at the trial in Denver, said his client’s conduct may have been ‘obnoxious,’ but it wasn’t a crime. The jury agreed.
The Dallas law firm represented GT Resources of Denver, which won a $41 million verdict this week in a dispute over royalties on 2.3 million acres in Costa Rica.
In a groundbreaking criminal case, the former owner of a staffing agency that provided physical therapists to home-healthcare companies is convicted of obstructing an FTC investigation – but acquitted of conspiring with competitors to fix wages.
A Seattle company represented by Johnny Ward of Ward, Smith & Hill prevails in a suit claiming patent infringement by a Japanese big pharma firm that reaped hundreds of millions of dollars from sales of an innovative breast-cancer treatment.

The Texas A&M University School of Law intends to become one of America’s greatest law schools. That’s not just A&M Chancellor John Sharp’s lofty goal or an empty objective for the law school dean. But in the so-important U.S. News rankings the school has been on a meteoric rise since A&M bought it almost 10 years ago. “The top 10 is where we ought to be,” Sharp says.
Panelists discussed key developments and enforcement trends in rapidly evolving areas of securities regulation including cryptocurrency trading and special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) and environmental, social and governance disclosures related to climate change.
An infringement claim against Epic Games, creator of the wildly popular Fortnite video game, is dismissed for improper venue by U.S. District Judge Alan Albright.
At the end of a weeklong trial in Marshall, a federal court jury determined that the Chamberlain Group failed to prove its garage-door patents had been infringed upon.
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