Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
A legal battle between two Energy Transfer subsidiaries and the City of San Antonio's utility company is just one example of the many lawsuits that are surfacing after winter storm Uri — and just one of more than a dozen lawsuits that the nation's largest municipally-owned utility company is bringing against natural gas providers.
A Houston bankruptcy lawyer has sued his former employer, Polsinelli, alleging that he was fired because he’s gay. The plaintiff is being represented by Bill Brewer III and Bill Brewer IV.
A federal judge in Houston has ruled that a tech company based in San Francisco should face trial in a lawsuit brought by victims of human trafficking who allege they were pimped through use of the company's sales platform. This story appeared in the Houston Chronicle.
Evan Young and Jason Villalba helped draft pending legislation to create complex business litigation courts in Texas. Last week, The Texas Lawbook interviewed them.
Jason Villalba: When you are dealing with billions of dollars and thousands of jobs are on the line, you don’t want to be rolling the dice. There needs to be a judicial ecosystem in place that better handles these types of cases. Having predictable outcomes is crucial in these large business disputes. Texas needs something like Delaware Chancery Courts to put us on the same global scale.Corporate executives and a handful of their lawyers want to create a new specialized court system that focuses only on complex commercial disputes similar to the chancery courts in Delaware - but with a Texas twist. The proposed Texas business court would have appointed judges, juries and its own business appellate court. It also has opponents who argued that there is nothing wrong with the current civil court system and judges elected by citizens. The Texas Lawbook has both sides arguments and in-depth details of the business court proposal.
A federal jury in East Texas awarded Plano-based property management software company ResMan with a $152 million verdict after finding a former customer improperly accessed ResMan’s software to develop its own rival product with a third party. The verdict is the conclusion of only one of two trials in the case, the first of which resulted in a mistrial due to a Covid-19 outbreak. Natalie Posgate has the details.
Burke Bogdanowicz may be only a month in existence, but it turns out that the firm’s office space has a storied history as the filming location for the final boardroom scene in the 1987 film RoboCop. The lawyers learned this last week when a Netflix crew and the writer of RoboCop paid their office a surprise visit. Founding firm partners Aaron Burke and Rob Bogdanowicz detailed the experience for The Lawbook.
Dallas trial lawyer Mark Werbner, who was a pupil of the great Jim Coleman, partnered for two decades with Dick Sayles and then practiced the past two years at Winston & Strawn, has started his own law firm. Werbner, who made global headlines in 2014 when he led an historic billion-dollar jury victory against a Middle Eastern bank accused of aiding terrorists, plans to do more plaintiff’s litigation and white-collar criminal defense work.
© Copyright 2025 The Texas Lawbook
The content on this website is protected under federal Copyright laws. Any use without the consent of The Texas Lawbook is prohibited.
