Texans for Lawsuit Reform

Through political action, legal, academic and market research, and grassroots initiatives, TLR fights for common-sense reforms that keep Texas open for business.

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For the Record

Looking to 2021

11/09/2020

The men and women who will serve in the Legislature will face important tasks next year, as the pandemic continues to cast uncertainty over everything from the state budget to the logistics for committee hearings at the Capitol. One thing is certain—the decisions made by legislators in 2021 will have a lasting impact on our state’s economy, job creation and future opportunities for Texas families.

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A Vacancy on the Court

07/27/2020

Texas judges matter. The decisions they make every day impact some of the most critical issues in our state, from the economy to public safety to our children’s education. Our state needs a judicial selection system that focuses on qualifications and experience, as the Texas Plan does. Our legal system is too important to leave these decisions to partisan political whims.

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Pandemic for Profit

07/16/2020

As the U.S. continues to deal with the widespread effects of COVID-19, it’s clear no industry is immune to the pandemic’s wrath—including law firms. But do all of these law firms really need to dig into the government wallet?

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The Road Back to Business as Usual

05/26/2020

While everyone looks forward to the day when we can resume business as usual, we all understand that given the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, its side effects will linger for many years to come. TLR has been working with state and federal leaders to determine if there is a way to give businesses some reassurance that they are not blindly approaching a liability cliff.

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TLR Statement on COVID-19 Liability

04/20/2020

Any Imposition of Liability Related to the Coronavirus Must be Based on Standards that Recognize these Extraordinary Circumstances

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Protecting Our Frontlines

04/13/2020

In the past few weeks, we’ve seen these men and women run toward danger, working around the clock and putting their own lives on the line to help those affected by COVID-19. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has created a task force to help ensure these professionals have the personal protection equipment they need and that their hospitals have the resources necessary to respond to a surge in coronavirus patients. But there’s an additional layer of protection that we should grant to the men and women on the frontlines of this pandemic: liability protection.

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Providing Essential Services

03/30/2020

“If the freight’s there, it’s got to move. If people are going to eat, the trucks are gonna move. If they need medical supplies, the trucks are gonna move. If we stop, the world stops.” As COVID-19 has proven, that service is more critical now than ever. 

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Anatomy of a Cottage Industry

02/28/2020

Over the past few weeks, we’ve highlighted the phenomenon of nuclear verdicts in Texas, and some of the questionable tactics used by personal injury trial lawyers pursuing trucking litigation in the Lone Star State. While trucking litigation has always existed, it seems a new cottage industry has sprung up in the last several years.

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Going Nuclear

02/18/2020

You’ve heard of nuclear explosions and the nuclear option. Nuclear verdicts? Maybe not. But as the name implies, we should all be wary of them. The widely accepted definition of a nuclear verdict is one that exceeds $10 million. But if that’s the threshold for nuclear, then Texas is quickly gaining a reputation as the home of the ultra-nuclear verdict in trucking litigation.

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Driving Litigation

01/10/2020

The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted a lawsuit issue that has increasingly become a problem in many states, including Texas: litigation against trucking companies. While it is not unusual for plaintiff attorneys to target trucking companies because of the companies’ insurance policies and assets, as the article notes, several factors have led to an increase in these lawsuits in recent years. At least one practice—used by lawyers in Texas and other states to refer potential clients for medical services—may expose the clients to “substantial risk” they may not fully appreciate.

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A Rock and A Hard Place

12/09/2019

It’s time Texas took a hard look at our antiquated system of electing all of our state’s judges. Texas is one of only six states to do so. It’s time we examine whether it’s right to force the men and women we want to administer justice in a competent and impartial manner into a system that forces them to be politicians and to raise campaign funds from interested parties to win elections.

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The Lone Star State is Alright, Alright, Alright

11/11/2019

Texas’ legal system got the late night talk show treatment last week when native Texan and Academy Award winner Matthew McConaughey cited Texans’ aversion to abusive lawsuits as one of the reasons why he chooses to live in the Lone Star State.

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Finding a Better Way

11/04/2019

Texas is facing a fundamental question: should Texans continue to elect its judges, or is it time to move to a different method? Last session, the Texas Legislature created the 15-member Texas Commission on Judicial Selection with the express purpose of answering that question. With last week’s appointments to the commission by the governor, lieutenant governor and speaker of the House, the state is poised to take a close look at how we fill seats on our judiciary.

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Look No Farther Than Texas

10/25/2019

Texas is often considered a national example for lawsuit reforms because—through 25 years of diligent work—we have successfully addressed many of the lawsuit abuses that plague other states. But one person’s example is another’s cautionary tale. At least, that’s what some Louisiana personal injury trial lawyers want you to believe.

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What a Nuisance!

09/06/2019

Opioid litigation is prominently in the news these days, with a recent judgment in Oklahoma and the ongoing conflict between states and municipalities in the federal multi-litigation process conducted by U.S. District Judge Dan Polster in Ohio. As we have said before, we don’t have an opinion on who is responsible for the nation’s opioid epidemic, but we remain concerned that the wave of litigation will do little to stop it—just as the tobacco settlement of the 1990s did little to stem cigarette consumption.

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Friend of the Court

07/22/2019

Amicus curiae is Latin and literally translates to “friend of the court.” These briefs are provided by people who are not party to a lawsuit, but have an interest in its outcome. Amicus briefs are just one way TLR fights to preserve the hard-won lawsuit reforms passed by the Texas Legislature.

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Guilty as Charged

07/15/2019

The fact that a judge under indictment for accepting bribes can run for higher office and win should be a major red flag for Texans. But unfortunately, many Texans simply don’t have enough knowledge about the candidates for judicial office to make informed decisions. Many voters cast their votes for judges based on party affiliation or name recognition, since they have no knowledge of the relative merits of the candidates.

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When a Cottage Industry Backfires

06/24/2019

In the past few months, we’ve spoken often about the ubiquitous presence of legal services advertising on the airwaves. In addition to your standard car wreck and mesothelioma ads, ads targeting specific products, medications or medical devices are designed to catch people’s attention and compel them to take action (specifically, to call a lawyer). But recently, there’s been a turn of events in one advertising cottage industry.

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A Rare Step in the Right Direction

06/10/2019

California has made quite a reputation for itself, and not in a good way. Case in point: the much ballyhooed addition of coffee to California’s recklessly broad Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, known as Proposition 65. The proposition “requires the state to maintain and update a list of chemicals known to the state to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity.”

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Making the Case for Legal Contract Transparency

06/03/2019

We all know better than to double dip. It is the epitome of bad manners. Highly frowned upon. And if you’re a county official in Texas, it’s also illegal. But that didn’t stop one county attorney.

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That’s a Wrap!

05/27/2019

The Legislature adjourned sine die, having accomplished a number of important priorities for Texans, including several important reforms to the legal system. Here’s an update on the status of some of TLR’s key bills.

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Legislative Update

05/06/2019

We’ve shared with you a number of reforms the Texas Legislature is working on this legislative session to improve our legal system. Now with less than a month to go in the 86th Legislature, we’ve entered the point in session where bills begin moving, and moving quickly. Here’s an update on the status of where some of these important reforms stand in the process…

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A Black and White Issue

04/29/2019

A lawyer is caught bribing a judge with cash and other gifts in order to secure favorable decisions, such as dismissing criminal charges against the lawyer’s clients. The judge is charged with a federal offense and is awaiting trial, and has been kicked off the bench. And the lawyer? You assume he’s been sent to jail, or at least lost his license to practice law. For one South Texas lawyer, that is not the case.

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As Seen on TV

04/22/2019

Every day, Texans are inundated with a relentless stream of advertising for legal services. As we’ve discussed before in this blog, personal injury trial lawyer advertising is neither new nor unique to a certain part of the country. If you’re watching TV, it seems these ads are inescapable.

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In Defense of Jury Duty

03/31/2019

Jury duty shouldn’t be thought of as, well, a duty. A chore carried out begrudgingly, like taking out the trash, only because you have to. Jury duty, rather, should be considered a privilege. Just like voting, it is one of the most fundamental ways we participate in our government.

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Ensuring Texans Have Access to Courts

03/17/2019

We speak often about the mushrooming cost of litigation, both in terms of time and money. The fact is that for many Texans, hiring a lawyer is expensive, and quite often, cases are too risky or too time consuming for the average person to pursue. This has effectively shut a large swath of Texans out of the court system. We at TLR think there is a better way.

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When Enough is Enough

03/08/2019

Unlike us here at TLR, most people don’t think about tort reform or the legal system on a daily basis (or even a monthly basis, for that matter). That is until lawsuit abuse flares up to impact something in their daily lives. Enter Apple and the Eastern District of Texas…

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Time for Transparency

03/04/2019

It’s time to make contingency-fee contracting consistent and transparent. The statutes and regulations in place for state contracts have successfully allowed the state of Texas to hire private attorneys when necessary, to keep more of the money from these legal awards and to bring more transparency to the process. What has worked for the state will work for its political subdivisions.

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Analyzing Texas’ Anti-SLAPP Law

02/22/2019

The TLR Foundation recently published its latest paper, The Texas Anti-SLAPP Statute: An Effective Statute, But is it Too Broad? The paper delves into the use of the Texas Citizens’ Participation Act (TCPA), which was passed in 2011 to protect the free speech rights of citizens.

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The 2019 State of the Judiciary

02/11/2019

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.

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When Technology and Litigation Collide

02/01/2019

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.

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Who Wins When Private Lawyers Encourage Government Litigation?

01/18/2019

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.

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An Open Letter

01/14/2019

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.

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Gone to Texas

01/03/2019

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.

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Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire

12/14/2018

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.

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Hitching Your Wagon to the Lone Star State

12/10/2018

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.

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Third-Party Litigation Financing 101

11/30/2018

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.

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The Tort Tax Lives On

11/16/2018

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.

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Storm Chasing Lawyers: Where Are They Now?

09/03/2018

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.

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Does Man’s Best Friend Stand a Chance in Court?

08/20/2018

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.

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When an Abundance of Caution Leads to an Abundance of Cost

08/13/2018

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.

Read More »

The Great Tuna Settlement of 2015

07/30/2018

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.

Read More »

Keeping the Texas Economy Humming

07/23/2018

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.

Read More »

Mass Marketing by Mass Tort Lawyers

07/09/2018

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.

Read More »

The End of an Era for One Storm-Chasing Lawyer

07/02/2018

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.

Read More »

Ambulance Chasing Our Veterans

06/25/2018

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.

Read More »

Texans Overwhelmingly Support Common-Sense Reform

06/09/2018

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.

Read More »

Judges Matter

06/04/2018

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.

Read More »

Welcoming the Newest Team Members

05/21/2018

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.

Read More »

Gov. Greg Abbott credits TLR and lawsuit reform

04/27/2018

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.

Read More »
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Texans for Lawsuit Reform

3 weeks ago

Texans for Lawsuit Reform

Trucking officials and tort reform advocates in Texas have introduced legislation seeking to end schemes between plaintiff attorneys and doctors under which medical costs related to truck accidents are overstated in court litigation, a practice that critics charge is contributing to a rise in large jury verdicts and lawsuit settlements against trucking companies. Read and share: bit.ly/38XtgRz ... See MoreSee Less

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Texas Truckers Fight Inflated Medical Costs in Litigation

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Trucking officials and tort reform advocates in Texas have introduced legislation seeking to end schemes between plaintiff attorneys and doctors under which medical costs related to truck accidents ar...
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Texans for Lawsuit Reform

3 weeks ago

Texans for Lawsuit Reform

“Our goals are simply to improve the fairness and efficiency of Florida’s civil justice system, to relieve parties from the expense and burdens of meritless litigation, and to save the work of juries for cases where there are real factual disputes that need resolution.” Read and share: bit.ly/3595BN3 ... See MoreSee Less

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Florida Supreme Court delivers the ‘Holy Grail of lawsuit reform’ in Thursday ruling

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The Florida Supreme Court on Thursday revamped a key legal standard as its conservative majority continued to show a willingness to undo previous decisions that have guided the state’s courts. “Ou...
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Texans for Lawsuit Reform

3 weeks ago

Texans for Lawsuit Reform

Some prominent business defense lawyers, reacting to a recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report about the relatively paltry number of COVID-19 exposure lawsuits to date, say we are merely at the starting gate for virus-related injury claims. Read and share: bit.ly/3b7TvYg ... See MoreSee Less

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Business defense attorneys warn that dearth of Covid exposure lawsuits no barometer for what’s coming

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Some prominent business defense lawyers, reacting to a recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report about the relatively paltry number of Covid-19 exposure lawsuits to date, say we are merely at the starti...
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lawsuitreform avatarTLR@lawsuitreform·
22 Jan 1352739089573945344

Sign up for the TLR Weekly News Roundup to receive a daily digest of headlines & news stories about lawsuit reform from Texas & around the country!

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lawsuitreform avatarTLR@lawsuitreform·
22 Jan 1352663609717960705

#ICYMI: Trucking officials & #tortreform advocates in Texas introduced legislation seeking to end schemes between plaintiff attorneys & doctors under which medical costs related to truck accidents are overstated in court litigation. Read & RT: #tortreform

Texas Truckers Fight Inflated Medical Costs in Litigation

Trucking officials and tort reform advocates in Texas have introduced legislation seeking to end schemes between plaintiff attorneys and doctors under...

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lawsuitreform avatarTLR@lawsuitreform·
21 Jan 1352391794013700096

TLR has thousands of supporters across Texas who are committed to a fair and balanced civil justice system. Join our team today!

Get Involved - Texans for Lawsuit Reform

Texans for Lawsuit Reform has thousands of supporters from across Texas who are committed to a fair and balanced civil justice system.

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Texans for Lawsuit Reform
1701 Brun Street
Houston, Texas 77019

Ph. 713-963-9363
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