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Jury Finds 3M Partially Responsible for Fatal 2020 Explosion, Awards $62.3M - In Round 4 of multidistrict litigation stemming from the fatal explosion at the Watson Grinding and Manufacturing facility on the Northwest Side of Houston, jurors determined 3M was 30 percent responsible. Most recently, in May, a different jury had returned a complete defense win for the company. The lawyers involved told The Texas Lawbook it was the first civil jury trial they had handled that required the jurors receive an Allen charge. August 10, 2026Top Stories
Top Stories
Dallas Marina Operator Snaps Up MarineMax for $1.5B - Dallas-based Safe Harbor Marinas said on Aug. 10 that it has acquired MarineMax for $53 a share, or about $1.5 billion, in cash. MarineMax, based in Oldsmar, Florida, is a boat and yacht retailer that also provides superyacht services. Sidley Austin provided outside legal counsel to MarineMax, while Simpson Thacher advised Safe Harbor. August 11, 2026
Kirkland Hires Top-Notch Trial Lawyer from Gibson Dunn - Today was Andrew LeGrand’s first day with Kirkland & Ellis after 14 years at Gibson Dunn. He said he has “no doubt in my mind that I made the right decision.” August 10, 2026Dallas Jury Rejects $15M Request, Awards Just Over $10K in Trucking Accident - A Dallas County jury awarded $10,814 in damages for past pain in a trucking accident case where the plaintiff had asked for $15 million. The four-day trial ended on Friday following seven hours of deliberation. August 10, 2026
CDT Roundup: Deal Volume Dips, but Billion-dollar Bets Persist - The week that was saw 13 deals valued at $11 billion. They included a $5.5 billion natural gas deal, a major fuel distribution acquisition, a landfill deal involving corporate cousins and a truly major fund raise for an Austin distributor of home battery installations. And, of course, there was SpaceX news. August 9, 2026
Latham Leads by Volume; Gibson Dominates Deal Value in Texas - Texas has emerged as a pivotal center of gravity in the 2026 capital-markets rebound. Lone Star companies are bringing major deals to market, but Texas-based lawyers are increasingly leading their execution here and elsewhere, according to The Texas Lawbook's Corporate Deal Tracker. August 9, 2026
Bexar County Jury Awards $8.45M to Woman in Netflix Documentary Defamation Case - Following a two-week trial before Bexar County Judge Nadine Nieto, a jury awarded $8.45 million to a woman who claimed she was defamed by statements made in the Netflix documentary Dirty Money. August 6, 2026
Two Years, Ten Judges, One Standount Case - As the Texas Business Court prepares to enter its third year, legal experts say one case really stands out as an exemplar for the new commercial litigation system’s potential: Dallas Mavericks v. Dallas Stars.
Texas business litigation expert Ben Barnes, in an interview with The Texas Lawbook, said the business court judge’s trial order in the fight between Dallas’ sports franchises shows the court’s ability to compress complex, high-stakes commercial disputes when the circumstances demand it. August 6, 2026
Centerpiece
Litigation Roundup: Permanent Injunction Against Samsung Urged in Patent Infringement Appeal - In this edition of Litigation Roundup, a hedge fund manager goes to prison for failing to report millions in income, and a bankruptcy law firm operating in Texas is pinged for filing cases with false financial information. August 10, 2026
20 Rulings, 5 Divisions: Reappointed Business Court Judges Build Rapidly Maturing Case Law - There’s no sign of a summer slowdown in Texas Business Court. The Court has delivered 20 opinions since our last monthly installment, and thus far, summer’s defining feature has been breadth over blockbuster. All five divisions and nine different judges pitched in. The First Division led the way with almost half the total publication volume. July supplanted May as the Court’s busiest month yet, but it was also its most doctrinally varied, one in which the Court behaved less like a specialty commercial docket and more like a full-service court majoring in business disputes.
Three themes tie the summer’s substantive opinions together thus far. August 10, 2026
Three themes tie the summer’s substantive opinions together thus far. August 10, 2026
Expert Voices
Texas Business Court Opinion Summaries for Q2 2026 - In the second quarter of 2026, the Texas Business Court continued to build on the progress of its first two years of operation, issuing both jurisdictional and procedural rulings and a growing body of substantive decisions. The larger story of the quarter, however, was the Court’s merits opinions, particularly in cases dealing with contract interpretation. The quarter also produced several high-profile disputes and significant awards. August 3, 2026
Texas Drew the Line on AI. Here’s How Employers Are Walking It. - The Texas Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act is reshaping how businesses hire, evaluate and schedule workers, shifting AI in the workplace from an abstraction to an immediate operational risk. With the Texas attorney general launching an online enforcement portal Sept. 1, this article gives practical advice for mapping TRAIGA across key workforce use cases and establishing a defensible AI governance framework. July 27, 2026
Stories You Might’ve Missed
The Real Harry Potter’s ‘Magic Wand — Loyalty to the Law’ - “Your boss is a crook!” Arthur Golden, a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell and a lawyer for Big Tobacco, screamed into the telephone in the fall of 1998. “A crook!”
On the other end of the line, Harry Potter, then a special assistant attorney general in Texas running the tobacco litigation, who was appointed three decades ago by then-Texas Attorney General Dan Morales to lead the historic lawsuit brought by the state of Texas against Big Tobacco. Potter and Golden had negotiated the details of the historic $15.3 billion settlement agreement between the state of Texas and large cigarette makers.
“Arthur was extremely angry — livid,” Potter said. “He talked about secret lawyer contracts. I didn’t know anything about it, but it sent chills throughout my body."
In Part II of The Texas Lawbook's series on the tobacco litigation, learn the story of the real Harry Potter, a Houston lawyer whose secret power was his ethics and commitment to the law. July 16, 2026
