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Texas Lawbook Hires Jeff Schnick as Editor

The Texas Lawbook has hired longtime business journalist and editor Jeff Schnick as its new editor. Schnick, 45, is the former editor of the Dallas Business Journal and a former assistant business editor at The Dallas Morning News. He will oversee a news team of nine reporters who cover business litigation and trials, corporate mergers, acquisitions and capital markets, law firm management and business bankruptcies.

“We’re working persistently to make our news product more comprehensive across all our coverage areas, as well as to ensure that our premium subscribers are offered more exclusive data and stories,” Schnick said in a Q&A, where he discusses his background, his passion for newspapers and his plans for enhancing Lawbook content.

Travis Torrence’s Road to U.S. Head of Legal for Shell USA

Travis Torrence is the great-great-grandson of slaves who worked on plantations along the River Road in Louisiana — a swath of land between New Orleans and Baton Rouge — just footsteps away from a Shell USA refinery in Convent and just miles away from Shell’s petrochemical plant in Norco. He is the great-grandson of Mississippi sharecroppers. His dad was a truck driver and his mother was a public high school teacher. Three months ago, London-based energy giant Shell named Torrence as its head of legal for its U.S. operations and associate general counsel over global litigation — the first Black person to hold the position.

“My story and my family’s history are not lost on me,” Torrence told The Texas Lawbook in an interview. In this story, Torrence talks family, his days at Shell and the attributes of the outside counsel he seeks to hire.

Power Struggle Underway in AT&T Data Breach MDL

In early June, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation transferred to U.S. District Judge Ada Brown a group of proposed class action lawsuits brought by dozens of lawyers over the AT&T data breach. Lawyers representing the plaintiffs — who are among the 73 million current and former customers who had their personal information released on the dark web — are already jockeying for leadership positions in the sprawling litigation. 

P.S. — Lawyer Joins PUC; DBA Takes Home Slew of Awards

This week’s edition of P.S. includes an upcoming inaugural convention in Houston aimed at supporting and empowering Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, a series of awards recently received by the Dallas Bar Association and the 4/11 on the PUC’s newest board member, who happens to be a lawyer. 

Motions Fly, Ex-Judge to be Deposed in SDTX Bankruptcy Court Romance Scandal Litigation

The litigation regarding the secret relationship between former Houston Bankruptcy Judge David Jones and former Jackson Walker partner Elizabeth Freeman heated up Tuesday when the U.S. trustee seeking to claw back $13 million in legal fees from the Texas law firm asked Southern District of Texas Chief Bankruptcy Judge Eduardo Rodriguez to reject Jackson Walker’s “no harm, no foul” defense and Jackson Walker won the battle to depose Judge Jones as part of its defense against the trustee’s efforts.

At the same time, in separate but related litigation, lawyers for former Bouchard Transportation Company CEO Morton Bouchard asked U.S. District Chief Judge Alia Moses of the Western District of Texas to reject the defendants’ motions to dismiss the racketeering and fraud lawsuit he filed earlier this year against Judge Jones, Freeman, Jackson Walker, Kirkland & Ellis and Portage Point Partners.

Narrow SCOTUS Majority Prohibits Nonconsensual Third-Party Releases in Bankruptcy

While the ultimate outcome of the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy case is likely to remain uncertain for quite some time, the failure to approve the plan may ultimately mean that no money at all will flow to these victims of the opioid crisis. However, the decision also stands to have much broader implications on the use of Chapter 11 to solve complicated problems, especially relating to mass tort cases. Given this potential to alter the landscape of Chapter 11 practice in future cases, the Court’s statutory analysis in the Purdue Pharma decision warrants close scrutiny.

Ex-Highland Capital Management CEO Can’t Duck Contempt Finding

James Dondero had appealed to the Fifth Circuit in September 2022, arguing the bankruptcy judge wrongly found him in contempt of a temporary restraining order and awarded compensatory damages to Highland. Judge Leslie H. Southwick wrote that the “minor factual issues” Dondero raised on appeal weren’t enough to undo the sanction. “Undergirding our analysis of the sanctions award here is a recognition of the goal of such awards everywhere: ‘to do rough justice,’” he wrote.

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