Eve Tort Report #24 newsletter

View in browser Every tort reform fight I have ever covered ran through Texas. So did I. I grew up in West Texas and spent two years clerking in a federal courthouse there. The caps Texas put on malpractice damages in 2003 became the playbook. Florida copied it in 2023, Georgia in 2025, and if your state hasn’t yet, the bill is in a drawer somewhere in your capitol with Texas’s fingerprints on it. On Tuesday, Texas voters got their say. Greg Abbott, a former Texas Supreme Court justice, hugs his wife and daughter, after conceding to Gina Hinojosa in Austin on Tuesday. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip) Democrats won the governor's mansion, a U.S. Senate seat for the first time since 1988, and all four Texas Supreme Court seats on the ballot, chief justice included. Republicans still hold the court 5-4. A 32-year GOP streak in statewide races ended in one night. Call it what it was: voters handed Trump and the GOP a beating. Kansas elected its first Democratic senator in nearly a century, South Carolina flipped a Senate seat nobody had on the board, and Mississippi is still counting one, with the Democrat up about two thousand votes. I don't write about politics here. I write about verdicts. And this election was about verdicts more than most people realize. Your state copied Texas. Texas just changed its mind. Texas built the model: caps on medical malpractice damages, a trucking law that lets defendants split your crash trial in two, a Supreme Court that for a generation treated a plaintiff's verdict as an opening offer. A verdict becomes money only when the appellate courts let it stand. In Texas the last word belongs to nine elected justices, and four of them just lost their jobs. Nothing on the books changed. The caps are still the caps, and the next nine-figure verdict still goes to a 5-4 Republican majority. What changed is the math. That majority was a sure thing for thirty years, and the defense bar priced it into every offer. Now one more cycle decides the court, and the sure thing has to go win an election. The rest of the board flipped too. Democrats took both chambers of Congress, which leaves the federal tort reform bills that have circled for a decade, litigation funding disclosure chief among them, unlikely to see a floor vote before 2029. The attorneys general moved too. Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas all flipped, and Kansas may make it five once the count ends. Those are the offices that built the records in tobacco, opioids, and Meta, the subpoenas no single plaintiff's firm could afford to serve. None of this changes the case on your desk Monday. It changes who reads your appeal, who digs up the documents you can't, and who writes the next cap. Your next appeal will be read by someone who wasn't on the bench last week. One more thing Golf is the only sport where you can lose a ball and your dignity on the same swing. I wrote for Golf Digest magazine in college, covering the PGA Tour. I was a good golf writer. I was never a good golfer. I was in Las Vegas this week for the Juryball conference, and it opened with a golf day. I'd traded the clubs for a surfboard years ago, but lawyers love golf, and I'd spent college watching people who play it for a living. I figured some of that would rub off. It did not. My playing partners hit the ball like it owed them money. I lost dozens of golf balls. They're all in the Nevada desert now, with everything else that state buries and never mentions again. I may or may not have hit the ball washer off the tee. I have retained counsel. Several, actually. They were all on the course. The JuryBall field. I’m in there somewhere, next to people who hit a fairway or two. Somewhere around the back nine I found my real role: telling stories and cheering the good shots, which was most of them. Late in the round I almost made a putt. The ball looked at the cup and declined. Golf Digest never taught me to play the game. It taught me to watch people who play it beaut