Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
Former NBA All-Star Jermaine O’Neal filed a lawsuit in Dallas County District Court on Monday against the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport on behalf of his company Drive Nation. The lawsuit alleges O’Neal put $14 million of his own money to finance the construction of the sports complex based on promises from airport officials that the surrounding land would be developed.
In this week’s edition of Litigation Roundup, the San Antonio Spurs beat back a lawsuit alleging it infringed two ticket sales technology patents, the SEC pursues a Texas duo in a $12 million Ponzi scheme suit, and the Texas Supreme Court gears up to hear a case involving the intersection of public information and attorney-client privilege.
After three decades of leading a boutique litigation firm, Alan Loewinsohn is reuniting with old friends and colleagues Mike McKool and Doug Cawley at McKool Smith. He is being joined by two colleagues from his prior firm.
In a federal lawsuit filed in the Western District of Texas Wednesday afternoon, gun maker Daniel Defense, communications company Motorola Solutions and Schneider Electric, which made and installed door locks at Robb Elementary, all were named as defendants. The suit is seeking unspecified damages to include punitive damages.
In this week’s edition of Litigation Roundup, Sidley is representing the Texas Medical Association in its Administrative Procedure Act challenge to the No Surprises Act, CenterPoint is ordered to pay $16 million to an injured worker and a Texas real estate developer is accused by the SEC of a $26 million fraud.
Joan Bullock, the first woman dean of the historically Black university's law school, says her abrupt dismissal in June was unexplained, undeserved and lacked due process. She is asking the court to enjoin the school from revoking her tenured teaching position until the facts surrounding the dismissal are heard by a faculty committee.
A federal jury in Austin slapped Facebook and Instagram and its parent, Meta Platforms with a $174.5 million verdict Wednesday, finding that the social media giant infringed on patented technology developed by messaging app maker Voxer. The case is a win for law firms Quinn Emanual and Mann Tindel Thompson.
In his four-page judgment, Judge Juan Renteria stated that the plaintiffs “voluntarily remitted a substantial amount of the exemplary damages.”
In this week’s edition of Litigation Roundup, a team from Vinson & Elkins gets a win for the Sabine-Neches Navigation District in a case of first impression involving the Water Resources Development Act, a bus manufacturer is hit with a wrongful death lawsuit over the death of a 6-year-old girl and a Taiwanese pipe maker escapes a wrongful death suit.
Lawyers for Houston-based Apache Corp. failed to convince a federal judge to toss out a proposed securities class action claiming that company leaders misled investors about an announcement in 2016 of “transformational discovery” of a West Texas shale play called Alpine High. A magistrate in Houston has recommended that the case move forward because the plaintiffs’ complaint is sufficiently detailed and specific in its allegations that company officials knew the information they made public in 2016 was “materially false.”
A Harris County jury recently determined that Matthew Smith, former general counsel to Microvast, had breached his fiduciary duty to his client, and owed it the cost of a laptop computer it purchased for him. The jurors rejected Smith’s argument that he was entitled to $3.4 million based on an oral agreement for stock options.
Mark Lanier, who hired Ken Starr to join his law firm in 2018, recalled helping his mentor navigate his departure from Baylor amid a scandal, Starr’s role as ‘principal architect’ of the firm’s appellate strategy in the $2.5 billion Johnson & Johnson talc powder case and other memories from their nearly 40-year relationship.
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