Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
For more than four years, two competitors in the senior-citizen insurance space had battled through a $17 million trade secrets dispute in a Chicago federal court. This week, a judge held that Bankers Life and Casualty Co. was entitled to just $2 in damages.
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, Texas Instruments is dealt a blow by the Texas Business Court in its quest to get an injunction against a competitor and a half dozen amicus briefs have been filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit by parties in favor of preserving a Texas gun restriction penal code.
A Texas appellate court Friday slashed more than $43 million in exemplary damages awarded against Alex Jones, holding that the trial judge erred by letting the parents of a student murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting to amend their petition post-verdict in order to avoid the state’s cap on exemplary damages.
The court concluded that the doctrine — which, in essence, bars civil courts from deciding cases that call into question a church’s doctrine, internal decisions and governance — applied to completely end Cindy Clemishire’s claims against Gateway Church and its elders.
In a breach of contract case where comments before the jury implied certain parties were racist, sexist or even akin to Nazi Joseph Goebbels, a new trial must take place, the Fourteenth Court of Appeals determined Tuesday.
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, a San Francisco-based research and data company gets two qui tam wins in the Northern District of Texas, and an Irving man settles insider trading allegations lodged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
A Houston lawyer in Kelley Drye & Warren’s environmental law practice group served as lead trial counsel for the state of New Jersey, guiding historic $2.4 billion settlements in “forever chemical” litigation against DuPont and 3M that were finalized via consent orders by a federal judge last week. Jackson previously represented the state of Louisiana in Deepwater Horizon litigation.
In Round 4 of multidistrict litigation stemming from the fatal explosion at the Watson Grinding and Manufacturing facility on the Northwest Side of Houston, jurors determined 3M was 30 percent responsible. Most recently, in May, a different jury had returned a complete defense win for the company. The lawyers involved told The Texas Lawbook it was the first civil jury trial they had handled that required the jurors receive an Allen charge.
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, a hedge fund manager goes to prison for failing to report millions in income, and a bankruptcy law firm operating in Texas is pinged for filing cases with false financial information.
For most of a two-and-a-half-hour scheduling conference Tuesday in the Jackson Walker bankruptcy fee case, the parties sat in silence while Chief U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Eduardo V. Rodriguez drafted and signed a pair of orders governing when the parties will be back for a hearing and when trial in the case will begin.
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