Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, Beck Redden and Dykema Gossett go head-to-head in a jury trial in Harris County, a group of Dallas residents get an appellate win in the fight over restrictions on short-term rentals and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit undoes a victory for the Austin American-Statesman in a lawsuit over an anonymous advertisement.
Mergers and acquisitions practices at nearly all law firms operating in Texas thrived in 2024. Eight law firms in Texas saw their M&A lawyers lead buyers, sellers and targets in 50 percent more M&A deals last year than they did in 2023, according to exclusive new data from The Texas Lawbook’s Corporate Deal Tracker. Nine other law firms witnessed a 10 percent or more increase in leading the principals in M&A activity in 2024, CDT data shows. But no law firm’s Texas deal lawyers were busier in 2024 than those at Kirkland & Ellis.
The bad news for Texas-based corporate law firms is that revenues, profits per partner and demand for legal services significantly trailed their out-of-state competitors during 2024, according to new Citi Law Firm Group data provided Monday to The Texas Lawbook. But the good news is that those outside national law firms — including Kirkland & Ellis, Gibson Dunn, Latham & Watkins and Sidley — growing faster and richer now make up about 60 percent of the Texas corporate legal market, according to the Texas Lawbook 50 report for 2024.
What do a monkey, two chickens, a duck, an alligator and a dog have in common with a beaver? Quite a bit if you ask Buc-ee's, the popular convenience store and gas station that has earned a reputation for aggressively defending its trademarks in federal court.
On Feb. 5, Houston-based Mattress Firm was finally sold to Tempur Sealy, the largest mattress manufacturer on the globe. It only took 639 days. Blocked by the Federal Trade Commission, the deal had been unblocked on Jan. 31 by a Houston federal judge. Shaking off some provocative language found in Tempur Sealy company emails, Judge Charles Eskridge decided that the FTC not only misunderstood the mattress market, but effectively ignored the very class of consumers he expected them to protect. The CDT Roundup looks at the end of the long-running transaction, as well as the Texas-related transactions reported last week.
On its third day of deliberations, a Dallas County jury awarded Bernard Tubeileh about $7.7 million in damages and rejected claims that he was fired because he’d stole millions from his employers.
Dean Omar Branham Shirley was in back-to-back trials last year across the country against Johnson & Johnson over allegations the pharmaceutical giant's talc-based baby powder contained cancer-causing asbestos. During an October interview with The Texas Lawbook in her Dallas home, name partner Jessica Dean was in between trips to Boston and Pittsburgh to try cases. “I believe, in a lot of the cases we work on, we allow someone who’s lost their life to bad conduct to be remembered in all sorts of fun ways: in the minds of jurors, in the minds of judges,” she said. “A case can live for years.”
Altus Power, a commercial-scale provider of clean electric power in Stamford, Connecticut, announced Thursday that it was acquired by TPG's climate investing platform, TPG Rise Climate, for $2.2 billion. Lawyers from Latham & Watkins and Kirkland & Ellis are advising on the deal.
While the law is by far the most significant safeguard of free speech rights for Texas citizens — with protections that must be jealously guarded — that fact often gets lost (or blocked) from the public discourse as powerful interests call for “reforms” that would gut the TCPA.
O’Melveny & Myers lawyers have joined Plano-based First Liberty Institute on a federal lawsuit accusing the city of Santa Ana, California, of violating a Chinese- and Taiwanese-American Christian church’s religious liberty rights. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the Central District of California, accuses the city of violating the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, as well as the First Amendment. O’Melveny is working on the case pro bono.
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