Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
Prominent Los Angeles trial lawyer Daniel Petrocelli sent an electronic letter late last Wednesday to lawyers for the plaintiffs in the Astroworld Festival tragedy announcing that he now represents rapper Travis Scott and offering to pay the funeral costs of those who died at the Nov. 5 concert in Houston.
“Your client’s offer is declined,” Corpus Christi attorney Bob Hilliard, who represents the family of 9-year-old Ezra Blount, who died at the concert, said in an email response to Petrocelli.
Three weeks after 10 people died and hundreds of others were injured at the Astroworld Festival tragedy, the number of lawsuits, plaintiffs and named defendants continues to mount. The demand for damages now tops $3 billion and the lawyer headcount involved in the litigation exceeds six dozen, including some of the most prominent and powerful law firms in Texas. But there are big questions: about insurance coverage, possible bankruptcy and questionable defenses.
A Las Vegas jury began deliberating Wednesday morning over whether to order UnitedHealthcare to pay a physician staffing firm millions. The impending verdict will decide the fate of the first case to go to trial involving the compensation of emergency room doctors through commercial health insurance plans provided by employers.
A Harris County jury has returned a $44 million verdict in connection with a woman’s allegation that she was assaulted at a Houston hotel during a business conference in 2017. The Nov. 18 verdict allocated 10% of the damages against the man she accused of assaulting her and 90% against Hilton Management for having failed to protect her when summoned to the scene. Litigation writer Natalie Posgate has the names of the lawyers involved.
Houston trial lawyers say Judge Sylvia A. Matthews is smart, fair, well-prepared, smart, organized, hard-working, smart, efficient, decisive … and smart. Those traits well serve Matthews, an experienced commercial litigator and trial judge, as she presides over pretrial matters in more than 150 (and counting) lawsuits stemming from one of the deadliest, costliest disasters in Texas history – Winter Storm Uri, the icy blizzard that paralyzed Texas and its electric grid last February.
A Houston federal judge is mulling over whether he will issue a temporary injunction that would order Houston plaintiff’s firm Feldman & Feldman to take down statements from its website that its courtroom opponent, residential sales leaseback firm EasyKnock, alleges are false and defamatory. EasyKnock alleges not doing so would cause irreparable harm, while Feldman & Feldman argues doing so would amount to prior restraint — a strict standard in First Amendment law.
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