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.
Chief Justice Nathan Hecht, writing for the unanimous court, explained that when the royalty provisions are read “together, not separately” and are considered in the context of the parties’ agreement, they are not ambiguous. But the ruling that sided with the University of Texas System Board of Regents did not give the university an outright win.
C. Gregory Shamoun of Shamoun & Norman, who represented 13MC in the trial, told The Texas Lawbook in a recent interview that from the beginning, he tried to “keep it simple” for the jury that was given what he said was “one of the most complex” charges he’s seen in 35 years of practicing law. It took the 12-person jury that heard a week of testimony about three hours on Monday to determine Megatel waived its right of first refusal to purchase the property from 13MC via a breach of contract.
Gov. Greg Abbott has appointed two judges each to the new business courts in San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth and Austin, leaving only the division in Houston without inaugural appointees.
The governor made appointments to the San Antonio court Thursday, while on Wednesday he appointed the judges in Dallas and Fort Worth and on Tuesday he appointed jurists to the newly-created Fifteenth Court of Appeals as well as the Austin division of the business courts.
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, U.S. District Judge Ada Brown gets her first crack at handling multidistrict litigation after 12 putative class action lawsuits over the AT&T data breach are transferred to her, the former president of a Texas energy company goes to prison and a trio of attorneys representing Southwest Airlines gets a stay on an order that they undergo religious liberty training.
A divided Fifth Circuit panel has determined the Llano County library must put back in circulation eight of 17 books that had been previously removed because of objections to their contents. The ruling was issued Thursday in the case brought by seven library system patrons who alleged that county employees’ removal of the books violated their First Amendment right to “access information and ideas.”
On Thursday, Justice Sonya Sotomayor delivered the 8-0 opinion of the court that held Truck Insurance Exchange should have been allowed to voice its concerns about the terms of a proposed $50 million settlement of thousands of asbestos-related lawsuits because the insurer is a “party in interest” in the dispute. Gibson Dunn's Allyson Ho argued the case and spoke to The Lawbook about its implications.
A little more than a week before trial was slated to begin, a settlement has apparently been reached in a case where Texas alleged Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook, had unlawfully used the biometric data of Texans without their consent and for commercial use.
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, Citgo draws another suit — this one seeking $400 million — from members of the so-called Citgo 6 who were imprisoned in Venezuela for years, XTO gets a win in a lawsuit over exposure to natural gas production activities that had been lingering in the courts for seven years and we detail some interesting grants from the Texas Supreme Court.
In a unanimous 24-page ruling issued Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed U.S. District Judge Keith P. Ellison’s April 2023 dismissal of the lawsuit brought by the heirs of Dr. Max Emden against the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The lawsuit revolved around who is the rightful owner of a 1764 painting by Bernardo Bellotto called “The Marketplace at Pirna.”
Lawyers from Dallas-based Waters Kraus Paul & Siegel earlier this month convinced the jury in a 10-2 decision that their client, Paul Gill, was entitled to damages from ExxonMobil for its failure to warn consumers about the risk of exposure to benzene that is in its petroleum products, including gasoline. Gill, who worked as a Mobil service station mechanic between 1975 and 1980, was diagnosed in 2019 with acute myeloid leukemia and testified about using gasoline to clean car parts.
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