Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
A Houston federal judge on Monday found IBM committed fraud against Houston-based BMC Software in a dispute involving IBM’s removal of BMC’s mainframe products from their largest mutual client, AT&T, during an outsourcing project several years ago. The price tag? More than $1.6 billion, including a $717 million punitive damages figure that BMC never specified during trial.
David Peeples, once lauded by Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan Hecht as the ‘gold standard’ for handling touchy cases, will decide if an improper jury instruction disqualifies a Tarrant County judge from sticking with a former flight attendant’s $26 million suit against the airline
At the conclusion of a six-day bench trial in Dallas, U.S. District Judge Karen Gren Scholer ordered a near-doubling of disability payments to former running back Mike Cloud, saying the league’s retirement board ‘spent virtually no time’ looking into his claims.
A lawsuit now made public pits Phillips 66 and Propel Fuels against one another and involves claims that P66 misappropriated Propel’s trade secrets after a deal fell through.
Seven intellectual property lawyers have left the Houston litigation boutique Ahmad, Zavitsanos & Mensing to practice law at a spinoff firm, Alavi Anaipakos, Natalie Posgate reports. The group departure follows the exit of former AZA name partners Demetrios Anaipakos and Amir Alavi, who left at the end of March.
Lawyers for Kimberly Goesling say the Fort Worth jury that exonerated the airline on May 11 did so after receiving a faulty written charge from the court.
For more than four years, Huntsman Corp. and its General Counsel David Stryker fought a high-stakes legal battle over an acquisition of a company whose technology ended up not working. Stryker and Huntsman hired the law firm Kirkland & Ellis to sue for fraud and breach of contract. In 2021, Huntsman and Kirkland won, securing an arbitration victory that led to a $665 million settlement. More recently, Huntsman and Stryker secured a $94 million jury verdict in New Orleans in a separate lawsuit. Stryker’s recent wins came in quick succession, but they were the product of the deep-seated instinct for advocacy that has coursed through Stryker’ veins since the day he became a trial lawyer. The 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Business Litigation of the Year goes to Stryker and the lawyers at Kirkland & Ellis.
Jurors found that British celebrity chef Mark Sargeant sexually assaulted Kimberly Goesling in a hotel room in Germany in 2018, but rejected her claim that American Airlines is to blame.
U.S. District Judge David C. Godbey, reversing a decision he made in 2016, refuses to dismiss the suit over what the plaintiff, VidStream, says is at least $600 million in unpaid patent royalties.
Mark Shank was a high school sophomore when he read a novel by Irving Wallace called The Seven Minutes, a legal thriller about a First Amendment trial over the banning of a book considered “the most obscene pornography ever written.” The lawyer in the book won an historic jury victory and convinced a teenaged Shank he should become a lawyer. Five decades later, Shank is the author of the 2022 edition of The Texas Litigator’s Guide to Departing Employee Cases. The Texas Lawbook interviewed Shank about his life, legal career and the behind-the-scenes making of his book.
After a three-week trial, a New Orleans jury found that industrial gas provider Praxair repeatedly breached its promises to Huntsman Corp. in a contract agreement and that those breaches directly caused Huntsman substantial financial damages. The verdict is the latest of a series of significant courtroom and boardroom wins Huntsman and its legal teams have achieved in recent months.
Unfair competition lawyers get to marry adrenaline, strategy and competition. This article shares a real-life example featuring all of those things on the way to beating a temporary restraining order.
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