Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
Michelle Casady is based in Houston and covers litigation and appeals — including trials, breaking news and industry trends — for The Texas Lawbook.
Michelle Casady has been a reporter in Texas since January 2009. She's covered crime at The Bryan-College Station Eagle, courts at the San Antonio Express-News and civil litigation for Law360. In July 2022, she joined The Texas Lawbook.
Her reporting has included covering arrests, trials, plea deals and settlements, executions, natural and manmade disasters, colorful characters and various oddities.
She lives in Houston with her husband Matt, a sweet dog Hurricane Harvey brought into their lives, and a confident cat who keeps everyone in line. She holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Texas Tech University and was a 2018 fellow of the Loyola Marymount University Journalist Law School.
You can reach Michelle at michelle.casady@texaslawbook.net or (713) 614-7929.
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, the SEC’s Fort Worth regional office closes out a case involving an alleged $91 million Ponzi scheme, a Dallas jury sides with Jani-King in a franchisee dispute, ExxonMobil investors are granted class certification in a securities suit and a Fifth Circuit panel affirms Pioneer Natural Resources’ force majeure win in a Winter Storm Uri dispute.
So many people showed up to the Camp Mystic bankruptcy hearing Friday morning that extra chairs were brought in and the courtroom doors were propped open to let the overflow hear. Opening statements, and much of the testimony, focused on the acrimony and distrust the creditor families say has infected the case.
In the Camp Mystic Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which involves 725 acres along the Guadalupe River that represent a family’s longtime ministry and its generational wealth, things have gotten, perhaps predictably, personal. Words such as “intense acrimony,” “distrust,” “incompetence and gross mismanagement,” “self-dealing” and “lack of candor,” dot the pleading filed by the official committee of unsecured creditors (13 families whose daughters died in the flood) who have asked the court to appoint a trustee to oversee the proceedings.
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, a lawyer who filed an AI-generated brief "littered with errors” is sanctioned by the Dallas Court of Appeals, a Stephenville businessman agrees to forfeit more than 90 exotic cars after admitting to running a scam loan program and Vinson & Elkins and Hunton Andrews Kurth gear up to defend data center clients against an environmental suit in San Antonio.
Jackson Walker is facing potential sanctions for failing to disclose the romantic relationship between its former partner Elizabeth Freeman and former U.S. Bankruptcy Judge David Jones in another corporate bankruptcy case. This case is not one of the 33 where the U.S. Trustee is seeking to claw back millions in fees.
He still has an active law practice, but Mike McKool’s legal work doesn’t lend itself to spending time in the courtroom these days. When he’s not working, he told The Texas Lawbook in a recent interview, he’s spent his time visiting with friends and driving offroad motorcycles on 40 miles of trails around his ranch near Waxahachie.
A Texas Business Court judge has determined the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association failed to sufficiently connect the dots between The Boeing Company’s alleged misrepresentations about the airworthiness of the 737 MAX aircraft, the subsequent grounding of those planes following two fatal crashes, and the consequential damages the union alleged its members suffered as a result.
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, the Texas State Securities Board says it was the entity that determined NFL star Travis Kelce was the victim of a Ponzi scheme, a dispute between concrete industry competitors is dropped and the Texas Supreme Court is urged to determine courts here have jurisdiction over a $500 million fight between Brazilian mining companies.
A fight between two former business partners who made tens of millions of dollars together building a futures prop firm in Austin before the relationship soured and spilled into separate fights in state and federal court in Texas recently ended in rare fashion. The plaintiff, Leo Riot, who in December 2024 had accused Darrell Martin and John Skelton, his former partners at Apex Trader Funding, of defrauding him, breaching contracts and misappropriating his intellectual property issued a public statement in August conceding none of his claims were true.
The appeal to the Texas Supreme Court comes about a month after the Fifth Court of Appeals in Dallas determined the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine required the dismissal of nearly all the claims Cindy Clemishire brought against Robert Morris, Gateway Church and three of its elders. Clemishire argued that ruling transformed the doctrine from “a tool of qualified restraint to a totalizing shield that leaves churches immune from judicial oversight.”
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