Texas

Introduction

For years, Texas has stood as the gold standard for balanced courts and a fair civil justice system. In recent years, however, cracks have begun to appear in that once-solid foundation. While the Texas Supreme Court remains committed to fairness and the rule of law, trial courts across the state are developing a growing reputation for pro-plaintiff leanings and nuclear verdicts®. Compounding these concerns, Attorney General Ken Paxton has launched a wave of industry-targeted lawsuits under the Make America Healthy Again banner — awarding lucrative contracts worth millions of dollars to his political allies in the plaintiffs’ bar.

Nuclear Verdicts®

In May 2025, a San Antonio jury delivered the city’s largest-ever verdict — an astonishing $831 million—to a plaintiff who was severely injured when struck by an intoxicated driver while riding his motorcycle in 2021. The 18-year-old driver had been drinking at Koozies Icehouse & Grill. The plaintiffs sued the establishment and its owner, Bob Kane, under Texas’ Dram Shop Act, alleging gross negligence. The jury assigned 45% of the responsibility to Kane, 45% to Koozies, and only 10% to the intoxicated driver, finding the defendants 90% responsible under the Act.

2025 also saw one of the largest wrongful death verdicts in the history of the state. A Harris County jury awarded $640 million to a decedent’s family who was killed in a construction accident in 2021. The jury found the operating company, TNT Crane & Rigging, grossly negligent and awarded $160 million in compensatory damages and $480 million in punitive damages.

Other 2025 nuclear verdicts® include a $31.2 million award issued in June in Tarrant County in the case involving the death of a Texas man while vacationing at a Cancun hotel.

In June 2025, the Texas Supreme Court threw out one of Texas’s largest nuclear verdicts® in recent years, a $90 million award, which had increased to $116 million with post-judgment interest. The verdict stemmed from a highway accident in which the driver of a pickup truck, during a winter storm, lost control and skidded across a 42-foot median, colliding with an oncoming 18-wheeler. Although the 18-wheeler was traveling below the speed limit, in the 2018 Houston trial, the plaintiffs’ lawyer blamed the trucking company for not instructing its drivers to take an alternative route, drive slower, or pull off the road during bad weather conditions. After seven years of appellate litigation, the Texas Supreme Court reversed, recognizing that while the accident was tragic, the trucking company did not cause it.

Drivers of Nuclear Verdicts® in Texas

A significant factor driving nuclear verdicts® in Texas are awards for noneconomic damages. These awards are subjective and unpredictable. They are even more so in Texas because, rather than ask jurors to return one award for past noneconomic damages and an award for future noneconomic damages, verdict forms ask jurors to return several awards, such as physical pain and suffering, mental or emotional pain or anguish, loss of consortium, disfigurement, physical impairment, loss of companionship and society, inconvenience, loss of enjoyment of life, and injury to reputation. In cases involving sympathetic plaintiffs who have experienced severe injuries, jurors may understandably feel compelled to fill in each blank line with a million-dollar figure, even if the amounts are compensating for the same emotional harm.

“Anchoring” is also a significant factor in Texas’s massive verdicts. Anchoring occurs when a plaintiffs’ lawyer plants an outrageously high figure in the minds of jurors who struggle with quantifying an amount to award for noneconomic damages, knowing that they are either likely to accept that amount or return a lower but still excessive verdict that they view as comparatively reasonable. In 2023, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that a plaintiffs’ lawyer went too far when, in a tragic case involving an accident with an 18-wheeler, he referenced the $71 million value of a fighter jet and the $186 million auction price of a painting before asking jurors to award two cents for every one of the 650 million miles the defendants trucks drove during the year of the accident for each decedent. The jury returned a $39 million verdict, which matched the “two cents” per person request. In a 2023 ruling, the state high court found that “unsubstantiated anchoring” like this, “whereby attorneys suggest damages amounts by reference to objects or values with no rational connection to the facts of the case,” is impermissible. Still, other forms of anchoring continue.

A third factor that contributes to excessive awards is phantom damages. “Phantom damages” occur when courts calculate a plaintiff’s medical expenses using a healthcare provider’s list price for medical services (sometimes called a “chargemaster rate”) instead of the amount the healthcare provider ordinarily accepts as payment from the patient, or the patient’s insurer, Medicare, Medicaid, or workers’ compensation. For example, a hospital may bill $20,000 for an emergency room visit, while the amount the hospital actually receives may be $8,000. The $12,000 difference is not owed or ever paid for the treatment — that is the amount of phantom damages.

Since 2003, a Texas statute has provided that damages for medical expenses are limited to amounts “actually paid or incurred.” The Texas Supreme Court has applied this statute to prohibit admission of list prices or billed rates that do not reflect amounts actually paid. Despite this statute, phantom damages persist in Texas. Some plaintiffs’ lawyers have used “letters of protection” (in which a medical clinic that treats the plaintiff agrees not to collect its charges until after the lawsuit settles) to avoid an amount “actually paid.” In addition, the statute does not address how to determine the reasonable value of future medical care.

Legislative Solution Fails

The Texas legislature had the opportunity to address these contributing factors and the nuclear verdicts® crisis with S.B. 30 but the bill failed in committee. According to a recent report, Texans pay an average of $1,725 more for goods and services every year as the cost of lawsuits and massive court awards are passed on to consumers.

AG Activity

Contributing to the deterioration of Texas’ civil justice system and the overall litigious nature of the state is Attorney General Ken Paxton and his abundant use of outside contingency fee counsel to target industry.

Over the past few years, Paxton’s office has “grown increasingly reliant on pricey private lawyers.” He has outsourced state representation contracts to lawyers with “whom [he] has personal or political ties” — including Tony Buzbee, the personal injury attorney who defended him during his 2023 impeachment trial— as well as to other attorneys at prominent firms whose senior partners have previously donated to his political campaigns.

Paxton continues to engage outside firms even when there are over 750 attorneys staffed in the Texas Attorney General’s office, including over 80 employees staffed in the Antitrust and Consumer Protection Divisions. Despite the army of government lawyers at his disposal, his office claims that the “legal services cannot be adequately performed by the attorneys and supporting personnel.”

One of the more lucrative contingency fee contract awards came in 2022, when Paxton launched an investigation against Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Ultimately, the state was awarded a $1.4 billion payout last year over the wrongful use of consumers’ biometric information without consent. Paxton hired one of his preferred plaintiffs’ firms, Keller Postman, as outside counsel, and allowed one lawyer to bill upwards of $3,780 per hour (which cost taxpayers $24,570 for one day’s worth of work).

2025 Litigation Launched Under MAHA Banner

Manufacturers of medications, infant formula, food, and even toothpaste have come under a barrage of lawsuits filed by Attorney General Paxton and his teams of contingency fee lawyers. These novel lawsuits are driven by fearmongering and populist politics, not sound science.

PAXTON FILES SUIT AGAINST TYLENOL FOR AUTISM CLAIMS

In a move that bears all the hallmarks of trial bar influence, Attorney General Paxton filed a lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson and its spinoff company, Kenvue — the makers of Tylenol — alleging that they deceptively marketed the pain reliever to pregnant women despite allegedly knowing that its active ingredient, acetaminophen, causes autism and other developmental disorders.

According to AG Paxton, he seeks to hold “Big Pharma accountable” and to “Make America Healthy Again.” And if he happens to make his plaintiffs’ lawyer friends wealthy at the same time, that’s just an added bonus!

Texas is the first state to file a case of this nature.

HEAVY METAL PROBE IN BABY FOODS

In August 2025, AG Paxton’s office launched an investigation into major baby food makers, including Gerber and Plum Organics, for their alleged contribution in selling baby food with “dangerously high levels of heavy metals,” including arsenic, lead, and mercury.

In its news release, the office alleges that the baby food manufacturers rely on internal metal standards that are set at “unreasonable levels.” Further, the companies are accused of deceptive advertising and false  misrepresentations about the health benefits of their products.

A spokesperson for Gerber told Law360 that they “regularly test for more than 500 toxins” and require their “products to pass at least 100 individual quality checks” before they are sold. The spokesperson also referenced the Consumer Report’s most recent rating, which highlighted Gerber as a top company for “transparency” as “parents and caregivers can easily find the test results for Gerber products on our website.” A spokesperson for Plum Organics emphasized their rigorous efforts in ensuring that their products follow the Food and Drug Administration’s recent “Closer to Zero” January 2025 initiative.

TOOTHPASTE PROBE

In May 2025, AG Paxton issued Civil Investigative Demands (CIDs) to Colgate and Proctor & Gamble, which sells Crest toothpaste, for misleadingly and deceptively “marketing toothpaste products to parents and children.”

In supporting this investigation, the Attorney General’s office relied on an August 2024 meta-analysis conducted by HHS’s National Toxicology Program which determined a “statistically significant association” between “fluoride exposure and lower IQ scores in children.” AG Paxton vows to “take aggressive action against any corporation that puts our children’s health at risk.”

Colgate came to an agreement with Paxton’s office in September 2025 to include visual depictions of fluoride-safe amounts of toothpaste for children that are “consistent with the product labels’ usage instructions” which are not being changed as they “consistently reflect FDA requirements.”

CANDY PROBE

In July 2025, AG Ken Paxton announced an investigation against Mars for engaging in “deceptive trade practices.” The candy-maker, responsible for making M&M’s and Skittles, publicly pledged back in 2016 to “remove all artificial colors from its human food products” but only did so in Europe. The press release notes that the company “falsely claimed that ‘artificial colors pose no known risks to human health or safety.’”

The Attorney General hopes that Mars will “honor its public commitment and ensure that it stays on the right side of the law” to “remove toxic artificial dyes from its U.S. food products.” He also urged Mars to “follow the lead of other companies like Nestle and Hershey by removing synthetic dyes from its products.” In a statement made to Law360, Mars asserts that all their ingredients are “manufactured in compliance with strict quality and safety regulations established by food safety authorities, including the FDA.”

TEXAS ATTORNEY GENERAL LAUNCHED INVESTIGATION AGAINST POPULAR CEREAL BRANDS

In August, the office announced an agreement with Kellogg, claiming that they are “legally agreeing to remove artificial food colorings from its cereals by the end of 2027.” Kellogg signed an Assurance of Voluntary Compliance being the “first [company] to officially sign a legally binding agreement.”

TEXAS AG KEN PAXTON SUES ROBLOX FOR DECEIVING PARENTS OVER ONLINE RISKS

It alleges violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act and asserts a common-nuisance claim, alleging that Roblox failed “to protect those children from the very real monsters that it knows are lurking on its platform.”

According to the lawsuit, Roblox has not implemented adequate safeguards to prevent minors from communicating with adults online. The state retained private counsel from Holtzman Vogel for the matter.