Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, a San Antonio-based Jackson Walker partner is tapped to represent a man in a $37 million bid-rigging conspiracy case in Hawaii, and Camp Mystic asks a Travis County district judge to send litigation over the fatal July 4 flood to arbitration.
Stonewall Gas Gathering, a West Virginia pipeline owner, has been ordered to pay $1 in a breach of contract case before the Texas Business Court. Antero Resources claimed it had suffered $200 million in damages from the alleged breach.
The Texas Business Court in Dallas trimmed the claims for trial by granting summary judgment for the Mavericks, finding the Stars didn’t comply with the “location commitment” in the parties’ contract when the team moved its headquarters to Frisco in 2003. There will be a hearing Tuesday morning to determine where the jury trial will take place next month.
March finds the court firing on all cylinders, producing an increasingly large (and increasingly diverse) output of opinions covering a wide range of issues at nearly every stage of the litigation life cycle — from remand fights to temporary injunction battles and from jurisdictional disputes to yet another trial verdict (this time from a bench trial).
Recent data from Lex Machina shows Texas federal courts are a national hotspot for trade secret litigation, but the number of lawsuits filed here aren’t enough to crack the top five. The Southern and Northern Districts of Texas were the busiest.
Fifty-nine law students from eight different Texas law schools are among the 1,224 law students who filed an amicus brief supporting Susman Godfrey and three other law firms fighting executive orders issued last spring by President Donald Trump declaring the law firms to be threats to national security.
When it came time to pick the jury for a landmark, bellwether social media addiction trial against Meta and Google, Mark Lanier had a choice to make: Did he want a jury more likely to find liability, or a jury more likely to maximize damages? “In this case, I made the choice for a liability jury,” Lanier told The Texas Lawbook in an interview Thursday. “In this case, the most important thing was to win. I told the team, we may win and only win $250,000, but I want to make sure we win.”
Houston litigator Michael Murphy has joined the boutique law firm Yetter Coleman as a partner. Murphy was with Winston & Strawn for six years, where he served as co-chair of the firm’s Houston litigation practice.
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, a recent ruling from a federal judge in Texas gives more clarity to oil and gas operators regarding the application of old contracts to modern drilling practices, and former Fifth Circuit Judge Gregg Costa gets a win in a gun rights case where he was appointed as amicus counsel to defend the Texas Penal Code.
In an oil and gas delivery contract dispute where Energy Transfer is seeking $432.7 million in damages, the parties gathered at the Embassy Suites in downtown Houston Monday for a bench trial that will take place before Business Court Judge Grant Dorfman over the next few weeks.
President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting Susman Godfrey “violates the First Amendment many times over,” is “odious viewpoint discrimination” and should be declared unconstitutional and illegally unenforceable.
With that opening argument, lawyers for Susman Godfrey filed a new brief Friday asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to uphold a lower court ruling permanently restraining President Trump’s executive order issued last spring targeting the Houston litigation powerhouse from being enforced. Two other corporate law firms that were the targets of President Trump’s EOs — WilmerHale and Jenner & Block — also filed briefs in their respective cases, which have been consolidated before the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.
Without writing a single sentence to explain why, the Texas Supreme Court on Friday officially ended any efforts by tens of thousands of Texas citizens and small businesses to sue power generators for personal injuries, wrongful deaths and property damages suffered during Winter Storm Uri in February 2021.
The decision is a huge victory for large power generators such as Luminant, NRG, Calpine, Exelon and Sempra Energy, who argued that the lawsuits, which sought billions of dollars in damages, should be dismissed because the unprecedented weather, not the companies’ actions, was responsible for the injuries and damages.
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