Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
Justice James P. Sullivan wrote the court’s unanimous 8-0 ruling in favor of American Midstream, holding the $6.1 million win for Rainbow Energy Marketing cannot stand. Justice Sullivan explained that when a Harris County trial judge “impermissibly blue-penciled extra words” into the parties’ contract, it caused a “cascade of errors that we now correct.” Justice John P. Devine did not participate in the decision.
A curious housekeeper who noticed Kim Bueno lugging weeks’ worth of outfits into her hotel room initiated a conversation with the trial attorney. The housekeeper asked Bueno about her trial. The former King & Spalding partner, who on Monday joined Kirkland & Ellis, explained that she defended a drug manufacturer against a lawsuit alleging its product was harmful. The housekeeper drilled in on three questions that prompted Bueno to rework her opening statement and to incorporate a standing ritual into her trial preparation.
A Dallas County jury on Thursday awarded almost $9.5 million to a trucking business that claimed it was forced aside when a private equity firm acquired its principal client, the El Rancho Supermercado grocery chain.
In a seven-page concurrence, Fifth Circuit Judge James C. Ho accused the U.S. Supreme Court of affording “special treatment” to “favored litigants” in a case involving deportation under the Alien Enemies Act. And he stood up for U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix, writing that he had "conducted himself in a reasonable and indeed admirable manner,” calling the U.S. Supreme Court’s criticism of his actions in the underlying case “unwarranted and unfortunate.”
American Airlines and Qurium Solutions, doing business as Supplier.io, have settled a federal lawsuit brought by Edward Blum’s American Alliance for Equal Rights, which alleged that their supplier diversity practices unlawfully prioritized race and ethnicity. While both companies denied any wrongdoing, they agreed to revise their policies to clarify that race and ethnicity will not factor into supplier eligibility or contracting decisions.
Recently, trial teams from Gibbs & Bruns convinced two Harris County juries to return complete defense wins for two of its clients, one that was facing as much as $13.7 million in liability and another that was fighting claims seeking more than $20 million in damages.
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, we detail two recent Texas Supreme Court rulings defining the contours of the Texas Citizens Participation Act, the whole Fifth Circuit unites to overturn a 45-year-old binding precedent in a lawsuit between a Houston plaintiffs firm and a former associate, and in another Fifth Circuit ruling, a panel upholds a $26.5 million award for a man injured in a collision with a letter carrier, writing that it wouldn’t “manufacture inequity, uncertainty, and arbitrariness” by adopting arguments presented by the Department of Justice in that case.
Jurors in Harris County this week awarded the family of a man who was killed at a construction site a total of $640 million, most of which came in the form of a whopping $480 million assessment of punitive damages against Houston-based TNT Crane & Rigging. A day before the jury assessed punitive damages, counsel for TNT had asked the court in an emergency motion for a mistrial, dismissal of the punitive damages phase of trial and sanctions against plaintiffs counsel, Tony Buzbee.
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