In the News

A number of Texas counties including Montgomery County, a sprawling suburb north of Houston, may have invalid contracts with their outside lawyers because they haven’t been approved by the Texas Comptroller as required under state law.

While a father-son attorney duo isn’t particularly remarkable, a court records search shows that a Provost Umphrey lawyer has worked with his son, whose name was previously mentioned in a barratry scheme, on dozens of storm lawsuits throughout Texas.

So-called tort reform has been an easy sell in states controlled by Republicans, and backers of a lawsuit-limiting proposal on the ballot in Arkansas this fall expected little trouble winning passage until they ran into a surprising obstacle from a reliable conservative ally.

In every cup of coffee, there is a chemical linked to cancer. That undisputed fact led a Los Angeles judge to rule this spring that coffee companies must provide cancer warnings to coffee drinkers. The ruling cast a shadow on a daily and often essential rite for more than 100 million Americans.

But now, the State of California has intervened, telling coffee drinkers not to worry. An agency has proposed a rule declaring that not only does coffee pose no significant risk of cancer, it may actually have health benefits.

Harris County, TX, considers itself a highly sophisticated government entity, with a population larger than 16 states and a territory larger than Rhode Island. Yet when it hired outside lawyers to represent it in lawsuits against the opioid industry, Harris County agreed to pay a contingency fee of 35%, more than double the rate in Dallas County and equal to the highest in the state.

A Texas appellate court has opted to keep a deposition offered by one of the state’s most renowned asbestos attorneys on the infamous “Terrell memo” sealed away from the public.

Justice is an 8-year-old American quarter horse who used to be named Shadow. And when he was named Shadow, he suffered. At a veterinarian’s exam last year, he was 300 pounds underweight, his black coat lice-ridden, his skin scabbed and his genitals so frostbitten that they might still require amputation.

The horse had been left outside and underfed by his previous owner, who last summer pleaded guilty to criminal neglect. And now Justice, who today resides with other rescued equines on a quiet wooded farm within view of Oregon’s Cascade mountains, is suing his former owner for negligence.

In an explosive lawsuit, a Southern California firm is accused of bribing cash-strapped 20-somethings to serve as lead plaintiffs and submit false testimony.

After ruling that a paralegal’s alleged deal to split fees with a Houston lawyer for clients he brought in connection with the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill was illegal, a Texas Court of Appeals nevertheless allowed the paralegal to move forward with a suit seeking at least some portion of the $503,080 he claims to be owed.

Arkansas needs lawsuit reform to compete economically and increase access to health care. As we work to grow our communities, we are burdened by the threat of frivolous lawsuits and the hidden costs of an out-of-date legal system that unfairly target job creators and penalize the doctors that care for our loved ones.

After Texas adopted lawsuit reform, its legislature commissioned a study that showed the fiscal stimulus attributable to lawsuit reform was almost $2.6 billion per year, resulting in almost 500,000 new jobs. In 2011, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher said, “the most important thing that’s happened to us [for economic development] is tort reform,” noting that the relocation of companies to Texas is “largely driven” by lawsuit reform that makes businesses more willing to expand and relocate there.