Texas Jury Awards Staffing Co. $14M Verdict Against Dynata

By Spencer Brewer

A Texas state jury handed a mostly clean sweep to a staffing company that accused market research company Dynata LLC of withholding payment for months of work, awarding about $14 million Wednesday after a trial in a Texas state court that lasted about a week.

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Buzbee, Ex-Client Say Roc Nation Can't Exit Conspiracy Suits

By Jack Karp

Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter's company Roc Nation "spearheaded" efforts to launch malpractice suits against the Buzbee Law Firm in retaliation for a lawsuit the firm filed accusing the rap star of rape, so it cannot exit a Texas federal suit over that effort by claiming a lack of jurisdiction, the firm said.

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Tony Buzbee Accused Of Duping Another Seaman

By Catherine Marfin

Texas personal injury attorney Tony Buzbee and his firm have been hit with another lawsuit from a seaman who alleges that the firm misappropriated payments he received after a 2020 ship injury.

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Catholic Charity Group Says Frozen Refugee Funds Abnormal

By Ali Sullivan

Catholic Charities Fort Worth argued before a D.C. federal judge on Wednesday that a purported pause on federal funding for refugee resettlement programs is abnormal and illegal, urging the court to unlock more than $36 million intended for resettling refugees in Texas.

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Brief

Trump Admin Seeks To End ACA Access For 'Dreamers'

By Britain Eakin

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday proposed a regulation that would do away with the Biden administration's rule allowing recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals to qualify for Affordable Care Act coverage.

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DOJ Drops Sex Abuse Suit Against Migrant Youth Shelter

By Britain Eakin

The U.S. Department of Justice and the nation's largest unaccompanied migrant children's shelter moved Wednesday to kill a suit accusing the shelter of turning a blind eye to its employees raping, sexually abusing and harassing children in its care.

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Crypto Influencer's Counsel Says SEC Will Drop Case

By Aislinn Keely

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has agreed to drop its case over cryptocurrency influencer Ian Balina's alleged promotion of so-called SPRK tokens, his attorney said Wednesday.

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Texas Urges Court Not To Let DuPont Out Of PFAS Lawsuit

By Jonathan Capriel

Chemical companies DuPont and Corteva are leaning on a "fraudulent transfer scheme" in order to exit a lawsuit accusing them of making and selling forever chemicals despite knowing about their toxic nature, the state of Texas said Tuesday, urging a federal court not to give them the out.

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Feds Launch 1st FEMA Fraud Charges Over LA Wildfires

By Rachel Scharf

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles announced Wednesday that three people have been arrested for allegedly submitting fake disaster relief applications to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the wake of the Palisades and Eaton fires, the first such charges to come out of the devastating January blazes.

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Justices Face Renewed Calls To Nix Mass. Wind Farm Permits

By Keith Goldberg

Fishing industry groups have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to undo federal approvals of the Vineyard Wind project off the Massachusetts coast, less than two months after the justices declined to consider another legal challenge by project opponents.

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Railroad Worker Says Board Schemed To Overtax Retirees

By Anna Scott Farrell

Retired railroad workers were incorrectly directed by the federal retirement board overseeing their funds to report millions of dollars in nontaxable benefits as taxable income in a scheme to line the board's pockets, a retiree said in a proposed class action in Texas federal court.

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Construction Co. Must Face Insurer's $7M Iron Plant Fire Suit

By Hope Patti

A construction company can't avoid an AIG unit's $7 million subrogation suit over a fire at an iron processing plant, a Texas federal court ruled, saying the insurer sufficiently stated a claim for negligence.

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Energy Co. Asks Justices To Skip On Inspector's OT Case

By Irene Spezzamonte

Energy industry service provider Killick Group told the U.S. Supreme Court that the Fifth Circuit correctly considered a pipeline inspector an independent contractor because he had autonomy in his job, urging the justices to stay out of the worker's overtime case.

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'Negligent' Delta Flight Crew Caused Crash Landing, Suit Says

By Jonathan Capriel

Delta Air Lines has been hit with another round of federal lawsuits over the "devastating crash" in Toronto in which its plane flipped upside down and caught fire, with passengers from Texas and Minnesota blaming the incident on the "negligence and recklessness" of the flight crew.

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Brief

Tech Co. Says Remote Worker Kept Old Job With Competitor

By Julie Manganis

A Texas-based technology company said a Massachusetts man hired to work remotely as an account executive last year secretly continued working for his former employer, a direct competitor.

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Boeing, Ex-Employee End Medical Leave Lawsuit

By Patrick Hoff

Boeing and a Muslim former supply chain specialist told a Texas federal court Wednesday they've resolved the worker's lawsuit alleging he was fired for taking medical leave, less than two months after the aerospace giant got his religious bias claims nixed.

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Trump Admin Drops Biden Bid To Unfreeze ACA Trans Rule

By Patrick Hoff

The Trump administration asked the Fifth Circuit on Wednesday to dismiss its appeal, filed in July by the Biden administration, of a Texas federal judge's decision to halt a rule protecting access to gender-affirming healthcare.

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5th Circ. Won't Revive Suit Over $58M Cloud Computing Deal

By Bonnie Eslinger

The Fifth Circuit backed the dismissal of cloud computing company Cloud49's lawsuit against rivals Rackspace Technology and Capgemini, rejecting claims that the companies engaged in tortious interference and trade secrets misappropriation during a Texas state cloud computing contract bid worth more than $58 million.

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Northvolt's Ch. 11 Dismissal Possible After Swedish Filing

By Vince Sullivan

Bankrupt electric vehicle battery maker Northvolt AB told a Texas bankruptcy judge that its Chapter 11 case is possibly headed for dismissal after its parent company filed an insolvency case in Swedish court early Wednesday.

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Look At All These 1-Word Orders In IP Cases, Justices Told

By Theresa Schliep

A patent owner has told the U.S. Supreme Court that there's momentum behind its push for scrutiny of the Federal Circuit's one-word orders in patent cases and its challenge to courts' summary judgment practices in such matters.

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LVMH Hit With Patent Suit Over NFT Smartwatch Display Tech

By Craig Clough

A company that developed a platform that enables users to display their non-fungible tokens on their watches has sued LVMH in Texas federal court over claims the luxury goods giant infringed on its "pioneering" nonfungible tokens display technology when it allowed NFT displays on its own smartwatches.

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Labcorp Warns Fed. Circ. Of 'Balkanization' In Prenatal IP Row

By Andrew Karpan

Labcorp, one of the world's largest chains of clinical lab providers, told the full Federal Circuit that a loss it incurred there over a patent tied to a $384 million judgment in Texas was the result of the "balkanization" of the court's patent obviousness jurisprudence.

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Brief

Askeladden Beats Software Patent At PTAB

By Andrew Karpan

An administrative patent board ruling has wiped out all of the claims in a patent covering payment software that had been asserted against over 20 different companies in the payment space.

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AG Watch: Texas Is Entering New Privacy Enforcement Era

The state of Texas' recent suit against Allstate is the culmination of a long-standing commitment to vigorously enforcing privacy laws in the state, and while still in the early stages, it offers several important insights for companies and privacy practitioners, says Paul Singer at Kelley Drye.

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Considerations As Trump Admin Continues To Curtail CFPB

Recent sweeping moves from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's new leadership have signaled a major shift in the agency's trajectory, and regulated entities should prepare for broader implications in both the near and long term, say attorneys at Pryor Cashman.

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Analysis

As Perkins Coie Fights Order, How Will Other Firms Respond?

By Cara Bayles

Perkins Coie LLP, represented by Williams & Connolly LLP, is challenging President Donald Trump's executive order revoking its security clearance and launching investigations into its diversity efforts. But other firms have remained silent, raising questions about the order's potential effects on how firms handle public policy litigation, publicly support their right to defend all clients and pursue hiring initiatives.

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Judge Blocks Order Limiting Perkins Coie Government Access

By Jared Foretek

A D.C. federal judge on Wednesday halted enforcement of the Trump administration's executive order against law firm Perkins Coie LLP that cited issues including its representation of Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential run, calling the order "viewpoint discrimination, plain and simple."

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3M's $6B Deal In Earplug MDL Cut Federal Caseload 14%

By Emily Field

A single settlement produced a 14% decrease in the number of pending cases in federal district courts over fiscal 2024, and that was 3M's $6 billion deal to end multidistrict litigation over its combat earplugs, according to a Tuesday report by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

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First-Time Bar Passage Rate Improved In 2024

By Tracey Read

Nearly 83% of first-time test takers who sat for the bar exam in 2024 passed, an increase of nearly 3 percentage points from 2023, according to statistics released on Wednesday by the American Bar Association.

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7th Circ. Revives Suit By Law Professor Disciplined Over Exam

By Lauren Berg

The Seventh Circuit on Wednesday revived a retaliation claim from a University of a law school professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago who was disciplined for including a redacted racist slur on an exam, saying the professor has plausibly alleged that his academic speech is protected by the First Amendment.

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Women Attys, AGs Urge Justices To Protect Provider Choice

By Hannah Albarazi

Women attorney groups and a group of state attorneys general urged the U.S. Supreme Court to reject South Carolina's attempt to stop Medicaid patients from seeing Planned Parenthood healthcare providers, saying in an amicus brief Wednesday that patients have a right to choose their healthcare providers and have a private right of action to enforce that right.

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Ex-Atty Gets 3 Years In Prison For Using Fake IDs To Get Jobs

By David Minsky

A former attorney has been sentenced to more than three years in prison after pleading guilty to charges related to using false identification in order to obtain jobs at multiple law firms in Florida, California and elsewhere following his disbarment in Ohio, according to federal prosecutors.

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