Today is official publication day for the paperback edition of my book The Rule of Lawyers: How the New Litigation Elite Threatens America’s Rule of Law, which came out in hardcover last year. (Amazon is still listing it as forthcoming, but I’ve seen advance copies and shipments should be arriving at stores.) If you’ve only read the hardcover version, you’re missing the newly written Afterword in which I talk about the fast-food litigation, Texas’s comprehensive lawsuit reform, and many other recent topics. C’mon, order your copy today — or better yet, a bunch of copies to distribute to readers who need to catch up on this topic.
Posts Tagged ‘Texas’
Where eagles fear to litigate
Eagle Pass, Texas, in Maverick County along the Rio Grande, isn’t likely to shake its reputation for plaintiff-friendly jurisprudence any time soon, as a San Antonio Express-News profile makes clear. “L. Wayne Scott, a professor at St. Mary’s University Law School…. who has mediated civil cases in Eagle Pass, estimates defendants there are roughly 10 times more likely to lose than in conservative Dallas and two or three times more likely to fall than in San Antonio. … Indeed, the prospect of facing a jury in Eagle Pass — where Mayor Joaquin L. Rodriguez also is one of the city’s top plaintiff’s attorneys — frequently makes companies more willing to settle and in higher amounts than they would agree to in other venues.” Although a 1995 round of state tort reforms has somewhat curbed the rampant forum-shopping by which plaintiff’s lawyers used to bring suits from around the state to Eagle Pass, there is still a steady diet of cases to be had against major national defendants, including suits against automakers over road crashes and a case against Connecticut-based shotgun-maker O.F. Mossberg & Sons Inc. over a hunting accident that took place in another Texas county. Local plaintiff’s attorney Earl Herring says that a case worth $10,000 in Eagle Pass would be “worth $500 in Uvalde.” (Greg Jefferson, “Eagle Pass remains known as plaintiff’s attorney paradise”, Nov. 2).
Morales gets four years
“Former Texas Attorney General Dan Morales was sentenced Friday to four years in prison for filing a false income tax return and mail fraud in a case stemming from the state’s $17 billion tobacco settlement.” Although Morales had entered a guilty plea as part of a plea agreement, “he insisted most of the accusations about public misdeeds were untrue.” (AP/Tyler Morning Telegraph , Oct. 31; Janet Elliott, “Morales ordered to prison”, Houston Chronicle, Nov. 1). Background: Oct. 2, Jul. 17, Jun. 26 and links from there.
Update: San Antonio evidence-faking and witness-tampering case
The Texas case we covered on May 23 and Jun. 26, 2000 and Mar. 17 of this year has now eventuated in a suit by DaimlerChrysler against the Kugle Law Firm. A trial court dismissed the Kugle firm’s $2 billion suit against Chrysler and imposed sanctions of $865,000 against three of the firm’s lawyers after finding that the steering decoupler of the sued-over Dodge Neon had been altered to simulate mechanical failure and that Mexican policemen had been asked to change their accounts of the accident giving rise to the suit. An appeals court called the firm’s conduct ‘an egregious example of the worst kind of abuse of the judicial system.'” “The senior lawyer at the firm, Robert A. Kugle, has been suspended from the Texas bar and has moved to Mexico. He could not be located for comment.” (Adam Liptak, “Law Firm Is Sued Over Conduct in Liability Case”, New York Times, Jul. 10; AP/Miami Herald; San Antonio Express-News). More: David Giacalone at EthicalEsq.? weighs in.
Judge jails former Texas AG Morales
“Former Texas Attorney General Dan Morales was ordered to remain in jail while awaiting trial on federal fraud charges after a judge determined today that he may have lied on two recent car loan applications and was a risk to commit financial crimes.” Morales, a key figure in the multistate tobacco litigation and long a familiar figure to readers of this site (see Jul. 15, 2002 and links from there; Jan. 10-12, 2003), was indicted in March (see Mar. 8-9) along with his friend Marc Murr and pleaded innocent to charges of having made improper efforts to gain hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for Murr from the state’s tobacco settlement. In the new development, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jim Blankinship presented U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks “with documents that he said showed Morales had purchased two used cars — a Mercedes and a Lexus — within days of filing a sworn affidavit with the court indicating that he had no income,” entitling him to representation by an appointed public defender. “According to Blankinship, Morales paid about $70,000 for the Mercedes and Lexus, both 2000 models. On loan applications to buy the cars, Morales listed his income as either $20,000 a month or $20,800 a month.” Judge Sparks remanded Morales into custody. (“Judge orders former attorney general to remain in jail”, AP/Houston Chronicle, Jun. 26; “Judge orders ex-AG Morales to remain jailed until October”, AP/Dallas Morning News, Jun. 26; David Pasztor, “Dan Morales jailed”, Austin American-Statesman, Jun. 25.)