For the Record

Last week, Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan L. Hecht delivered an outstanding State of the Judiciary address to the governor, lieutenant governor, members of the legislature and guests. The chief justice’s speech, which is delivered every other year during the legislative session, addressed several areas of accomplishment for the Texas judiciary, several areas where challenges remain and several goals for the next biennium.

Technology is inseparable from modern life. It’s logical that the advances that make our daily lives more convenient would also be applied to industries like litigation. The question, though, is whether technology encourages additional litigation or discourages additional innovation? Read more.

There is a time and a place for local governments to partner with private attorneys to pursue claims in court. But some of these local lawsuits can actually interfere with efforts to address public policy challenges.

Can you do exactly what the government tells you to do and still get sued? TLR’s latest blog explores this question and the reforms Texas has enacted to address it.

Can you imagine living in a state whose legal system is so unfair, your livelihood depended on leaving? Texas has been there, done that. Once known as the Wild West of Litigation, it was a place job creators avoided because of the risks and costs of being sued. Today, Texas is the land of opportunity in America. But we shouldn’t take that for granted. Erosion in the quality of our legal system is an economic red flag that we would be wise not to ignore.

For watchdogs of the Texas legal system, the American Tort Reform Association’s annual Judicial Hellholes report provides some good news and some bad news. The good news is that Texas has successfully avoided being named the worst of the worst for the second year in a row, since storm-chasing lawyers propelled us to a Hellhole designation in 2016. The bad news is that two massive 2018 verdicts from Texas trial courts landed us on this year’s Dishonorable Mention list. And as they say, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

With 2018 winding down, Texas managed to squeeze in one more big national economic ranking before the ball drops. This time, it’s Forbes’ annual ranking of best states for business, which puts the Lone Star State at #3 overall.

For those of us who only play lawyers on TV, the legal world and its jargon can be perplexing. Being deposed in the legal world doesn’t (usually) involve any sort of Game of Thrones-like coup. You might want to keep your Latin dictionary handy if you’re doing any light legal reading, and what’s with all this talk about barratry, anyway? Fortunately, we at TLR are here to help shed some light on the lesser known areas of the legal system that still deserve our close attention. One such area is third-party litigation finance.

You could pay for a couple of months’ rent in a nice apartment in Austin, Dallas or Houston. $3,535 gets you more than halfway through a semester of tuition at The University of Texas at Austin. It could also buy you more than 1,100 gallons of milk, more than 1,300 gallons of gas and nearly 600 gallons of Blue Bell ice cream.

September 1 marks the one-year anniversary of the enactment of House Bill 1774, the Texas Legislature’s solution to stop storm-chasing lawyers from taking advantage of property owners after natural disasters. After the explosion of unnecessary lawsuits against insurance companies following hail and wind events, property insurers in parts of the state were raising premiums and deductibles, or had stopped offering coverage in some areas all together. The Legislature acted decisively in 2017 to shut down this obvious lawsuit abuse and stop storm-chasing lawyers from hijacking our property insurance premiums.

Picture this: You are the defendant in a lawsuit. You spend thousands of dollars and months preparing to defend your case in a court of law. You hire an attorney to help navigate the web of legal issues created by this litigation.Then the day arrives. You show up to court, and sitting on the other side of the courtroom is the plaintiff…a monkey.

The New York Times recently looked into “defensive medicine,” or the practice of doctors ordering excessive medical tests in an attempt to stave off medical liability lawsuits. Testing out of an abundance of caution, many doctors believe, can potentially shield a physician from being sued in the event of an issue with a patient down the road.

But as it turns out, this understandable “CYA” by health providers is costing all of us big bucks.

A recent newspaper article spurred us to look into The Great Tuna Settlement of 2015. What we found, of course, was more evidence of client recruitment by enterprising plaintiff lawyers.

Texas is turning heads, yet again. The latest national recognition comes from CNBC, which recently named Texas the Best State for Business in 2018. This makes the Lone Star State the first to snag the top spot four times in the study’s 12-year history.

Personal injury trial lawyer advertising is not new. The U.S. Supreme Court deemed it a matter of free speech in 1977, opening the door to an estimated $1 billion in lawyer advertising in 2017. But just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s good.

TLR spent the 2015 and 2017 legislative sessions working to fix the problems storm-chasing lawyers were creating for Texas property owners. Fortunately, the Texas Legislature passed a common-sense solution in 2017 to make it harder for these lawyers to file unnecessary lawsuits, while maintaining the strongest insurance consumer protections laws in the United States for Texas property owners.

Barratry—more commonly known as ambulance chasing—is one of the biggest challenges currently facing Texas’ legal system. Barratry has been illegal in the Lone Star State for decades. But that small technicality hasn’t stopped the practice from flourishing.

The Texas Legislature last year overwhelmingly passed a common-sense lawsuit reform to keep storm-chasing lawyers from hijacking property insurance claims and making insurance coverage more expensive for us all. The TLR-inspired legislation passed with active support by Governor Greg Abbott and Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

More than a year later, polling shows that Texans overwhelmingly support the Legislature’s actions.

The buck stops with Texas judges. Whether it’s upholding laws passed by the Legislature or deciding cases that have an impact on our economy, education and public safety, Texas courts of appeals judges are critical to our state.

By Mary Tipps

TLR is a small organization, but we’re one big family. So when our family grows, we like to celebrate it! This week, our senior chairman, Dick Weekley, hosted a reception to welcome our new president, Lilyanne McClean, and our two new board members, Marc Watts and Michael Weekley, to the team.

We want to share this video of Gov. Greg Abbott’s comments at a recent press conference. Members of the TLR staff were on hand to see the governor accept Site Selection Magazine’s Governor’s Cup for job creation and economic growth. The governor gave TLR and lawsuit reform a shout out for helping to grow Texas’ economy and create opportunity for families.