For more than forty years, evidence of a plaintiff’s failure to use a seat belt has been inadmissible in car-accident cases. In February 2015, the Texas Supreme Court issued an opinion abandoning this rule in Nabors Well Services v. Romero. In a car-accident case, a jury is traditionally directed to determine the plaintiff’s and defendant’s […]
The family of a Texas woman who remains in a coma after falling out of a golf cart at the Houston Rodeo two years ago has settled its lawsuits. The woman was volunteering at the rodeo when the driver of the golf cart she was riding in took a sharp turn, causing her to fall […]
Insurance rates for Texas homeowners continue to rank third highest in the nation and are still well above the national average, according to a new report by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. The average annual cost of the most commonly sold policy in Texas was listed at $1,661, an increase of 5.2 percent from […]
Wage-and-hour lawsuits filed in Texas by workers and federal regulators have more than tripled over the past decade. Texas workers have sued 922 times so far this year, up from 632 times in 2012 and 280 in 2004, according to research by Androvett Legal Media of U.S. District Court cases filed in the state’s four […]
SAN ANTONIO – Five workers injured in an Eagle Ford shale oil rig fire are now being treated at San Antonio Military Medical Center. That fire happened around 6:45 p.m. Friday at a Pioneer Natural Resources rig off Highway 97 near Tilden. That’s about 70 miles south of San Antonio. A Pioneer representative said the […]
All across Texas, the drilling and fracking boom has boosted fatal accidents for oil and gas workers, and for those who share the urban and rural roads that serve as important oil patch connectors. Triple tragedies – accidents that killed three or more people – have become common. The death toll from those kind of […]
The shale-gas boom of recent years has contaminated drinking-water wells in North Texas’ Barnett Shale and the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, a study published Monday concludes. The study, by researchers from five universities, concludes that neither drilling itself nor the hydraulic fracturing that follows it is directly to blame. The study, published in Proceedings of the National […]
For six decades, highway deaths have dropped steadily all across the US, but in Texas all motor vehicle fatalities – and accidents involving commercial trucks – have turned back upward since the state’s oil drilling and fracking boom began in 2008. In fact, consistently since then, Texas has led all states in motor vehicle deaths, […]
Texas saw a decline in the number of people killed on the job in 2013, but the state still leads the nation in workplace fatalities, according to preliminary government data released Thursday. As the Texas Tribune reported in its Hurting For Work series this summer, Texas has led the nation in worker fatalities for seven of […]
North Texas water wells within two miles of active gas drilling sites contain higher concentrations of arsenic and other carcinogens, according to a study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. In the study, University of Texas at Arlington biochemists measured 100 wells across the Barnett Shale and compared the results to a similar […]