Houston megadonor Dick Weekley and his group Texans for Lawsuit Reform are losing in the Legislature after 30 years of wins

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The Houston Chronicle is part of an initiative with ProPublica and The Texas Tribune to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

Decades after convincing the Texas Legislature to make it much harder for people to sue doctors and corporations, the influential group Texans for Lawsuit Reform is facing more resistance than ever in its latest push to further restrict legal liability for business.

The lobbying group and its founder, Houston GOP megadonor Dick Weekley, still enjoy considerable power. Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick – who received $100,000 in campaign donations from TLR’s political action committee and another $53,000 from Weekley last year – put both major pieces of legislation the group is backing on his list of “priority” bills in January, alongside more high-profile issues like marijuana, bail policies and school vouchers.

But the group’s efforts have drawn fierce opposition this year from trial lawyers and consumer protection interests, as well as some doctors and conservative activists who supported tort reform in the past. The group has also engaged in a nasty statewide advertising war, with Weekley himself accusing opponents of “waging an expensive and vicious disinformation campaign” in an email to supporters earlier this month.

“They’ve run into headwinds on these bills, there’s no question about it,” said Bill Miller, a veteran lobbyist who served as a spokesperson for TLR during its first big legislative successes in 1995. “This session has not measured up to what they’ve enjoyed in recent times.”

Both of the group’s signature legislative proposals have yet to clear key House committees. Senate Bill 30, which originally set sweeping limits on virtually every type of monetary damage award that Texans could get, has been watered down significantly just in the last few days. Senate Bill 39, which restricts how trucking companies can be held accountable after accidents, is also undergoing last-minute revisions.

“You don’t make revisions at the last minute unless you’re in real trouble,” Miller said. He added that a massive truck crash in Austin last month, which killed five people including a baby and child, further complicated the trucking bill’s chances.

If the bills fail to advance by the end of this week, they will almost certainly be dead – the latest in a string of defeats for TLR and 79-year-old Weekley, who has long been one of the state’s most influential powerbrokers.

The group is still reeling from its unsuccessful attempts to take on Attorney General Ken Paxton, a darling of the national conservative movement and top contender for a U.S. Senate seat. In 2022, a candidate challenging Paxton’s reelection received more than $1 million from Weekley but failed to earn even a fifth of the Republican primary vote. And after many of his allies in the Legislature backed a failed impeachment effort against Paxton the following year, they lost their seats in the 2024 elections.

“Their horns were out. They were trying to get as much as they could get, and they couldn’t get all that,” said state Rep. Mitch Little, a Republican freshman lawmaker who last year beat a TLR-backed incumbent Republican who received more than $100,000 in campaign donations from the group. Little also worked on Paxton’s defense team during his impeachment trial.

The triumph of Paxton and the return of President Donald Trump are both signs of a vastly different Republican Party than the one TLR helped bring to power starting in the mid-1990s. Protecting big businesses from lawsuits is no longer a winning issue for ultra-conservative voters, who are deeply skeptical of large institutions and government attempts to help them.

And Weekley is not the only Republican megadonor in town; he must now contend with Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, whose priorities include more hot-button social issues, as well as Elon Musk, who gave $1 million to TLR last year but has not weighed in publicly about its current legislative agenda.

“They’re not the 800-pound gorilla stomping around the Republican party like they used to be,” said James Henson, director of the Texas Political Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

Trial lawyers who would be most affected by SB30 and SB39 say TLR is also struggling this session because it’s promoting policy that would further impede ordinary Texans’ ability to seek justice when they’ve been wronged.

“I think there’s quite a bit of opposition to both of these bills on both the Republican and Democratic side, because they’re so fundamentally skewed,” said Jack Walker, president of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, TLR’s longtime political adversary.

Weekley declined a request for an interview. TLR president and general counsel Lee Parsley said he was confident the bills would make it over the finish line and receive bipartisan support.

“The Republican Party has changed,” he acknowledged, and “that does create a little bit more of a challenge.” But, he added, “We’ve been doing this for 32 years. We’ve got a long history of success at the Capitol. We know what we’re doing.”

"Keep swimming or you’ll die"

When TLR announced a six-figure ad campaign complete with billboards targeting “lawsuit abuse” across the state earlier this year, some felt a sense of deja vu – or as Miller described it: “Haven’t we done this before?”

Indeed, back in 2003, the group was the driving force behind some of the biggest changes to the civil justice system in the nation. That year, Texas lawmakers agreed to cap certain damages in medical malpractice cases, even enshrining the policy in the state’s Constitution so the courts couldn’t overturn it. They also added a slew of liability protections for everyone from drug manufacturers, to nursing homes, to construction companies – including Weekley and his brother David’s behemoth homebuilding business.

By supporters’ accounts, the policies helped spark an era of economic prosperity often referred to as the “Texas Miracle.” But now a coalition of businesses led by TLR, including insurance companies, transportation providers and homebuilders, believe that era is under threat because some judges are tilting the scales toward plaintiffs.

“It varies from courtroom to courtroom,” said Dick Trabulsi, who co-founded TLR along with Weekley back in 1994, but “the problem is so pervasive, it’s creating this crisis.”

Trabulsi pointed to one case in which a jury awarded $17 million to a man killed in a truck crash near Amarillo. The plaintiffs’ attorney had urged jurors to calculate most of that amount based on factors that seemed unrelated to the crash, like the number of miles all of the trucking company’s drivers had traveled that year.

TLR and its allies say judges are too often allowing such illegitimate arguments, which leads to more so-called “nuclear verdicts,” or monetary awards in the tens of millions or even billions of dollars. That’s why the group is proposing new legislation this session to dictate what can be admitted as evidence during civil trials. A national nonprofit backed by companies like Uber also launched a seven-figure ad campaign promoting the agenda this spring.

But critics say the tort reforms of the past came at a steep enough cost to Texans, who already have little recourse if they’re the victims of wrongdoing by doctors and businesses. Those same reforms mean that “nuclear verdicts” are often not what they seem; in fact, in 2023, the Texas Supreme Court struck down the verdict in the Amarillo trucking case.

In another example, legal analysts expect that a recent $860 million verdict for the family of a Dallas woman who died in a crane collapse will almost certainly be reduced.

More than half of the amount was for “punitive damages,” which are meant to send a message to wrongdoers, but Texas law has actually capped such damages at $750,000. Jurors aren’t allowed to know that, so the award usually gets slashed later.

Similarly, after a Houston-area jury awarded a woman $366 million in a race discrimination case against FedEx back in 2023, a federal appeals court knocked the award down to less than $300,000.

If nuclear verdicts aren’t actually a problem, the legislation TLR is proposing isn’t necessary, said Will Moye, a Houston-based personal injury lawyer who used to represent insurance companies. “Why are we fixing something that’s not actually broken? And for what benefit? Insurance companies are going to make more money?”

Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University, said the problems TLR is highlighting aren’t nearly on the scale of when the group first began promoting tort reform – nor do voters care as much. “That’s why they’re going over the top on these campaigns, tending to exaggerate,” he said.

“Interest groups promote interests. Like a shark, you have to keep swimming, or you’re going to die,” Jones said.

"Will it pass? I don’t know"

Despite TLR’s challenges in recent years, it got off to a strong start as the 89th Legislative Session kicked off. Both SB30, which Patrick labeled “Curbing Nuclear Verdicts,” and SB39, called “Protecting Texas Trucking,” passed the state Senate with unanimous Republican support in April. But GOP members in the state House of Representatives were less convinced.

“Some of the changes they wanted to make were frightening to me, honestly,” said Little, the freshman House Republican.

The original version of SB30 made major changes to how juries could award compensation for past and future medical costs, even capping those costs based on what Medicare might pay – whether the person who got treatment had health insurance or not. The bill also made it impossible for someone to recover damages for medical treatment that didn’t have an “industry-recognized” billing code.

Supporters said the goal was to stop personal injury lawyers from steering their clients toward doctors that “overdiagnose, overbill and overtreat – what I call ‘the medical mill’,” said state Sen. Charles Schwertner, R-Georgetown, the bill’s author, when presenting it to colleagues on the Senate floor in April.

Walker, of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, pointed out that millions of Texans don’t have health insurance. He also said many doctors are unwilling to treat victims of accidents for fear of getting involved in litigation, and so they bill for their services separately from insurance – the only way those people can get care.

Little said those concerns resonated with him and many other lawmakers. So the bill remained stuck in a House committee until Wednesday, where it finally got approved – but only as a shadow of the original, according to a copy of the legislation obtained by the Houston Chronicle. The Medicare-based cap is out, as is any reference to how juries should decide on future medical costs. So is the industry billing code requirement, as well as a proposal to make major revisions to the definition of “noneconomic damages.”

None of those changes are final, however, and the bill must still clear another House scheduling committee before it comes to a vote.

‘Will it pass? I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine,” Little said.

In a statement, Schwertner told the Chronicle that “Senate Bill 30 strikes a careful balance between ensuring fair and just compensation for victims and upholding accountability in Texas courtrooms." He did not answer specific questions about the bill, the prevalence of nuclear verdicts or TLR’s influence.

A staffer for state Sen. Brent Hagenbuch, R-Denton, the bill’s Senate co-author, said he was unavailable. State Rep. Greg Bonnen, R-Friendswood, who authored the companion bill in the House, said on the House floor that he was too busy for an interview, and his staff did not respond to requests for comment.

SB39, which limits the evidence that juries can hear during lawsuits against trucking companies, is in similar peril. The bill makes it harder for jurors to learn about how a trucking company failed to vet a driver involved in a crash; that evidence can only come in when they’re deciding on “punitive” damages, rather than damages related to medical costs or pain and suffering.

The idea is to prevent attorneys from bringing up a laundry list of trucking companies’ failures, including missteps that had nothing to do with the accident in question.

Leigh Joseph, a personal injury attorney in Austin, said the legislation goes too far.

Joseph is representing a mother and child who were injured after a concrete pump truck crashed into a school bus in Bastrop last year. The driver reportedly admitted to using cocaine and had a history of drug abuse, and Joseph said there’s evidence that his employer failed to address it. But SB39 would prevent her from presenting that type of information to the jury for a big portion of the trial.

“It’s very important to know his employer saw him that day when he was likely on drugs, didn’t notice, didn’t care (and) handed him the keys” when the jury is deciding who’s at fault, Joseph said.

The bill’s Senate author, state. Sen. Brian Birdwell, R-Granbury, did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did its co-authors, Hagenbuch and state Sen. Adam Hinojosa, R-Corpus Christi.

State Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano who wrote SB39’s House companion, declined to comment.

A "darn effective" fundraising strategy 

For years after Texas’ first major tort reforms became law, Republicans were in lockstep with TLR. The group had spent an enormous amount helping them gain control of the Legislature, outgunning deep-pocketed trial lawyers who tended to donate to Democrats.

”Weekley would get on the phone with all of his pals in Houston and the CEOs of big companies and say, ‘OK, I need lots of money,’” recalled George Christian, who has worked as a lobbyist on tort reform issues since the 1980s. “And it was a lot. And they would give it to him.”

In some ways, that hasn’t changed. Weekley remains the Houston region’s most prolific political donor, contributing $6.7 million last year to state and federal campaigns, as well as TLR’s PAC.

In that same time frame, TLR contributed more than half a million dollars each to Hagenbuch and Hinojosa, as well as more than $300,000 to Leach. All were either authors or co-authors of one or both of the group’s signature pieces of legislation, SB30 and SB39.

“They have a solid number of Republican legislators who are in lockstep with them,” said Little of TLR. “In some ways, that is scary.”

But that money can only go so far given that the group must now fight against Democrats as well as ultra-conservative Republicans, who don’t all share pro-business values and are also wary following TLR’s feud with Paxton.

That dynamic is clear in television ads running across the state, including one that describes TLR as a “shadowy Austin lobbying group” and claims that “they want Chinese corporations, drug companies and doctors transitioning children protected from civil liability.”

It’s not clear who’s behind the ad, which was paid for by an obscure Virginia-based nonprofit. But Anthony Holm, a former GOP political operative-turned trial lawyer who has put out similar messaging on the trucking bill, said the ad reflects a new and effective strategy against TLR: appealing to Republican primary voters.

They make up “approximately 3-ish percent of the overall electorate,” but they choose the GOP lawmakers who run the state, Holm pointed out. “And who are those 3%? They’re people who care about life and guns and immigration, and Chinese corporations invading Texas.”

Holm, who previously worked closely with TLR and also served as a spokesman for Paxton, said he still has “great reverence” for Weekley and Trabulsi and supports many of the group’s goals. But he thinks the legislation it’s pushing this year is going too far, and he’s not shy about using the modern conservative playbook to make his point. He said he’s been able to raise enough money to spend “over a million dollars” running ads against the trucking bill.

“They are pushing policies that no longer resonate with Texans or the Legislature,” he said of TLR. “When is enough enough?”

Parsley said there’s still more work to be done, and he thinks lawmakers agree with him.

“We never make enemies. We only make friends. That's really our job around here,” he said.

Lauren McGaughy, an investigative reporter and editor for The Texas Newsroom based at KUT News in Austin, contributed to this story.

Disclosure: Rice University, Texans for Lawsuit Reform, Texas Trial Lawyers Association and University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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