Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
The torts and defamation case centered on the role of Greenpeace, the activist international environmental group, on protests in 2016 and 2017 against a controversial North Dakota pipeline. Greenpeace, based in the Netherlands, said the verdict could cause an end to its U.S. organization. Trey Cox, a Dallas partner at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, led the legal effort for the plaintiffs with an all-Texas team.
The crux of the case is whether the Railway Labor Act preempts the claims brought by SWAPA. Boeing says it does because deciding the case requires interpretation of the collective bargaining agreement between Southwest Airlines and its pilots. SWAPA says the RLA does not preempt its suit because the act only applies to claims between airline carriers and employees, and Boeing is not either of those.
Samsung had asked the court to sanction opposing counsel in a sealed motion filed in October, alleging attorneys representing CogniPower had deposed a Samsung representative using a doctored document. David Folsom of Texarkana was appointed by the court to serve as special master and investigate the issue in October.
The NCAA had told the court there was no evidence to support Texas’ contention that any men were competing in women’s sports. “As previously represented to this Court, the NCAA is not aware of any transgender female student-athletes in any division of women’s college basketball. Moreover, even if there were, the 2025 policy would prevent them from competing.”
Advances in technologies to treat water produced from oil and gas fracking operations has made what was a worthless by-product into a potentially valuable resource. It’s now worth fighting for, as evidenced by arguments in the closely watched case of Cactus Water Services v. Cog Operating.
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, the Texas Supreme Court answered a burning question about the jurisdiction of the Fifteenth Court of Appeals, and Google moves to arbitrate a negligence lawsuit over an AI chatbot.
Texan Elon Musk, who has seen his net worth plummet hundreds of billions of dollars this month due to a steep decline in Telsa stock, quietly added a new foe last week — Susman Godfrey and Houston partner Justin Nelson — which could be a courtroom-size headache for the world’s wealthiest person. Nelson, who led the Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million victory over Fox News in 2023, filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Media Matters against X Corp/Twitter, accusing the social media platform and its owner of abusing the civil justice system to get vengeance against media entities that he blames for his economic losses.
On the first day he became the new Chief Judge of the Eastern District of Texas, Amos Mazzant III issued an order that shook up the caseload assignments for the eight judges who serve in that district. Here, we share Chief Judge Mazzant’s answers to a handful of questions The Lawbook posed to him regarding the new order.
A judge in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, has determined that Cardinal Midstream is owed $51.9 million in damages from Energy Transfer in a lawsuit stemming from a 2018 gas pipeline explosion.
Texas’ new system of business courts came with the kind of “fear and trembling” that often accompanies change on such a grand, institutional scale. “What else are courts created for business supposed to do besides favor business,” many worried. But our new business courts have spent the last several months both dispelling those fears and proving why these courts are a smart investment — as much for the public as for litigants.
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, a team of Kirkland lawyers gets an early win for a client facing a whistleblower’s False Claims Act suit, a suit stemming from the romance scandal involving former judge David Jones gets trimmed and the Dallas appellate court declines to bring an early end to a barratry lawsuit against a personal injury law firm.
A new lawsuit filed in Harris County Thursday evening accuses litigation support services company Lexitas of systematically breaching an agreement with Houston-based legal video and litigation support company SmartDisk by siphoning off work it was entitled to perform to other entities.
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