Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher secures a big win on appeal for a major Brazilian mining company that was facing a $500 million lawsuit in Nueces County, and a team from King & Spalding beats back class certification in a 6,000-plaintiff antitrust case playing out in federal court in Illinois.
In this edition of Asked & Answered, FBFK’s Solomon Wisenberg talks about how he got involved in the Whitewater-Lewinsky investigation and what trends he is seeing in his white collar criminal defense practice. While the Texan has spent the majority of his career in Washington, D.C., he returned home to the Lone Star state a few years ago and joined FBFK in December.
The explosion not only devastated a Texas community, it initiated a reevaluation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Risk Management Program. As of 2026, the RMP is entering its fourth major rulemaking cycle since the explosion in West.
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Fort Worth regional office gets a final judgment against a Mansfield man accused in a $2.9 million fraud, and a company that offers an array of services to fuel retailers turns to the Texas Business Court in pursuit of $21 million in damages.
In the counsel of many, there is wisdom.
That is a paraphrase of an Old Testament quote that I used in the opening of the securities class action we tried to a jury earlier this month in Judge Ed Kinkeade’s court in Dallas. It applied to our securities class action defense, which was rooted in the good faith efforts of the hard-working people of ExxonMobil. But it also applied to the trial team that won the case, a combination of firms and lawyers that came together to produce a winning result in a very rare circumstance where unexpected events intervened.
A Dallas jury deliberated for more than three hours after a 14-day trial in U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade’s courtroom before finding ExxonMobil did not have any intent to commit the fraud it was accused of. The lawsuit was filed nearly a decade ago.
The chief engineer of the Singaporean container ship MV Dali has hired prominent Houston criminal defense attorney David Gerger to represent him against federal charges filed Tuesday involving the ship’s March 2024 crash into the Francis Scott Key Bridge that killed six people and caused billions of dollars in damages.
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, a lawsuit Mercuria Energy American filed against a former trader won’t be going to trial after all, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission gets a $7 million final judgment in a case against a forex trader from Houston it alleged was operating a Ponzi scheme.
The California Invasion of Privacy Act stands out because it allows for both criminal charges and civil lawsuits for statutory violations. This sets CIPA apart from more recently enacted consumer privacy laws in both California and Texas, which do not include civil enforcement. This has turned CIPA into the go-to law for attorneys looking to challenge web privacy practices in court.
CIPA’s broad reach brings Texas companies into the crosshairs, with Texas companies becoming increasingly aware of and worried about potential claims under CIPA.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has named Dallas lawyer David Woodcock as its new director of enforcement, overseeing the agency’s federal civil corporate securities and fraud investigations and prosecutions.
Woodcock is taking a multimillion-dollar pay cut by leaving Gibson Dunn, where he has been a partner in Dallas since 2023.
For many years, the privacy community took the position that the state of California was the leading data privacy regulator. The state of New York, with its active cyber enforcement by the New York Department of Financial Services, was a close second. However, in the past two years, Texas has emerged not only as a significant privacy regulator but also as an aggressive enforcer of its laws.
Texas has passed a comprehensive series of laws relating to consumer and children’s data privacy, artificial intelligence and data brokers, among other things. And the state’s attorney general has secured multibillion-dollar settlements against major technology companies for alleged violations of state laws. While the federal government and many other states have taken a light-touch approach to privacy and AI, Texas has been out front.
Dallas-based Rogge Dunn Group has filed a Financial Industry Regulatory Authority arbitration claim against Goldman Sachs, alleging that it committed age discrimination, wrongful termination and unlawful withholding of earned deferred compensation. The complaint seeks more than $2 million in damages and $1 million in punitive damages.
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