The Texas Government Code creates, among other civil remedies, a private right of action allowing clients to void a contract for legal services that was procured through barratry.  This case involves two Texas lawyers who represented out-of-state clients in personal-injury litigation filed after others, allegedly on the lawyers’ behalf, approached those clients in Louisiana and Arkansas to encourage the lawyers’ retention. After the underlying personal-injury cases settled, the clients sued the lawyers and their firms in Texas, contending that Section 82.0651(a) entitles them to void the legal-services contracts and to recover fees and penalties under Section 82.0651(b).  The trial court dismissed all claims, but the court of appeals reversed, concluding that the Texas law applies because at least part of the lawyers’ alleged conduct occurred in Texas.  Applying Texas’s presumption that its statutes do not apply extraterritorially, the Texas Supreme Court, in a divided opinion, concluded that the statute did not extend to the non-resident clients’ claims because the conduct that is the statute’s focus – i.e. the solicitation of a legal-services contract through illegal barratry – occurred outside Texas.

“The clients conceded at oral argument that their allegations are limited to ‘the financing and the directing of the solicitation’ and not ‘the unlawful solicitation.’ Because Section 82.0651’s focus is on the solicitation of the legal-services contract, and the solicitation undisputedly occurred outside Texas, the fact that some unlawful conduct, such as the solicitation’s financing, occurred in Texas does not make the application of Section 82.0651(a) in this case any less extraterritorial.”

 

Pohl v. Cheatham, No.23-0045, 2025 WL 1349691 (Tex. May 9, 2025).