Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
A challenge to a high-profile patent that endangers a multibillion-dollar verdict. An SEC settlement worth hundreds-of-millions involving a Texas-based financial services giant. An Texas-based airline sued for a passenger’s wrongful arrest. All this and more in this week’s litigation roundup.
Ryan General Counsel John Smith said the Dallas-based tax services provider sued USA Today and parent company Gannett Co. because the media company published allegedly defamatory articles about Ryan’s business practices but never disclosed in its articles that Gannett employed Ryan to identify potential tax savings and then failed to pay for its services. Ryan, in the lawsuit filed Monday in Montgomery County, accuses the national newspaper chain of defamation, breach of contract, unjust enrichment, quantum meruit, suit on a sworn account and fraud.
A new legal thriller out this month details the story of some Texas plaintiff’s lawyers who took on the pork industry's most powerful player, a formidable opponent that provoked death threats, had the legal team followed and even changed some laws in the middle of the five-year nuisance litigation that resulted in five jury verdicts totaling hundreds-of-millions. The Lawbook sat down with Wastelands author Corban Addison Thursday when his book tour brought him to Dallas.
After years of operating the Corporate Deal Tracker Weekly Roundup, it dawned on The Lawbook staff that we should run something similar on the litigation end.
The idea budded out of a need to keep track of more litigation than our small staff is able to in the context of substantive, standalone articles. That way we can help you (and ourselves) keep abreast of even more of the Texas-sized quantity of lawsuits, trials, settlements, or other notable developments that fill business litigation dockets daily across the state.
We’re yet to develop any formal rules or structure to it, so in the meantime, we’re giving the first roundup a go with a handful of matters that have caught our eye in the last week.
If you have any matters that you think are worthy of a mention in a future roundup, please email your submission here: tlblitigation@texaslawbook.net
Lawyers for Kimberly Goesling said Tarrant County Judge Kimberly Fitzpatrick should be recused because of ‘irregularities’ in her instructions to the jury that exonerated American last month. The recusal motion was denied Saturday by a San Antonio senior judge brought to Fort Worth to decide the matter.
State District Judge Kimberley Fitzpatrick says she can’t explain why jurors weren’t given the correct form to record their verdict, or how they instead got an outdated version that included an instruction she’d earlier ruled was improper.
The Dallas Hispanic Law Foundation last week honored 18 Texas law students with its annual scholarships, bar study grants and internships. The Lawbook reveals this year’s recipients and breaks down why they were chosen.
The jury found against Elevate Development, an Austin company that sought to acquire and develop six parcels on Sixth Street, in ‘one of the most vibrant parts of Austin.’
A Houston federal judge on Monday found IBM committed fraud against Houston-based BMC Software in a dispute involving IBM’s removal of BMC’s mainframe products from their largest mutual client, AT&T, during an outsourcing project several years ago. The price tag? More than $1.6 billion, including a $717 million punitive damages figure that BMC never specified during trial.
David Peeples, once lauded by Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan Hecht as the ‘gold standard’ for handling touchy cases, will decide if an improper jury instruction disqualifies a Tarrant County judge from sticking with a former flight attendant’s $26 million suit against the airline
At the conclusion of a six-day bench trial in Dallas, U.S. District Judge Karen Gren Scholer ordered a near-doubling of disability payments to former running back Mike Cloud, saying the league’s retirement board ‘spent virtually no time’ looking into his claims.
A lawsuit now made public pits Phillips 66 and Propel Fuels against one another and involves claims that P66 misappropriated Propel’s trade secrets after a deal fell through.
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