Courts

In 2008, Rebecca Williams sued DART. She worked in the agency’s human resources department at the time, and said that she had been ordered by her boss to hire only Hispanics, as she told WFAA at the time. She was subsequently fired in what she says was an act of…

A six-year court battle waged by the feds against an ExxonMobil policy mandating the retirement of all corporate pilots at the age of 60 was dealt its second defeat in a Dallas federal court. The challenge, filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, characterized the policy as ageist and in…

On February 3, Clay Carpenter and two golfing buddies went to hit around at The Golf Club at the Resort in Fort Worth. They made it through the front nine okay, but ran into a group of four golfers on number 12. Carpenter’s group was fine with waiting behind the…

Bloomberg names Elaine Marshall the fourth richest woman in the U.S.

Back in June, we told you about Joe Bankson and Gena Charlton, a couple in Hardin whose rural farmhouse was raided after law enforcement got a hot tip from a psychic named “Angel” about a mass grave on the property. The mass grave didn’t exist, Angel quickly made herself scarce,…

In June, Bill and Barbara Harris opened Silver Spoon Bakery and Cafe in Southlake. “I’m 81 years old, my wife’s 78,” Harris said. “We’re not dead yet, and we’re just trying to stay active.” Silver Spoon is a lunch spot whose every detail, from the cutesy, pink-striped walls to the…

Lamar Advantage Outdoor Company and Ralston Outdoor Advertising each own a handful of billboards along I-35 between the Loop 12 split on the south and the intersection with LBJ on the north. Last year, the companies began to worry about the impact to their property of the LBJ Express Project,…

A Grapevine ad agency is accusing WFAA of throwing its weight around and scuttling a relationship with its biggest client. Ann Page-Cahill of AP Commnications filed suit against WFAA’s parent company, Belo Corp. and her former client, Baylor Health Care system in district court Tuesday, claiming Baylor cut her firm…

Neighborhood blogger and professional shit-disturber Avi Adelman is not happy with the Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market being built at the former site of Whole Foods on Greenville Avenue, right across the street from his house. He was even less happy when the retailer put up ridiculously bright lights in its parking…

A case out of Marshall, reported today by Courthouse News, is truly the Bermuda Triangle for moral compasses. Janna Ardoin brought Chester, her Chinese Pug, into Patchwork Pet Resort and Veterinary Clinic with his eyeball dangling from its socket, attached by the merest of threads. She had three choices: Pay…

Robert Garmon and Rodney Spinato were the only black bartenders working for Wolfgang Puck Catering’s Dallas operation. They were, as they describe in a discrimination lawsuit filed today, “excellent, hard-working employees who were wrongfully terminated because of their race.” What led them to this conclusion was not the fact that…

Chesapeake Energy, the country’s second-largest producer of natural gas, has been hit with a class-action lawsuit accusing the company of violating royalty agreements with landowners in Tarrant and Johnson counties. As you may recall, an identical suit was brought in July by a family of Johnson County landowners who claim…

You may know Tom Corea from the twice-weekly, half-hour infomercials he ran on daytime TV called Ask a Lawyer with Tom Corea. Or you may know him as that attorney who sued KTVT and Channel 21 for $1.4 million over said show, claiming the stations didn’t forward calls to his…

David Womble, a Dallas County maintenance supervisor, leaves an impression on his employees. In June, three of them sued the county for discrimination after one, Dennis Jones, was fired for having previously disclosed felony convictions while his white colleagues were not. Womble, the suit claimed, created a hostile work environment,…

Strip clubs are the brave new frontier in employment lawsuits. Women who were for years treated as “independent contractors” are filing suit in droves against their current or former employers. All of them want basically the same thing: the minimum wage and overtime money they feel they should have gotten…

In June, as part of its ongoing effort to further endear itself to the driving public, the North Texas Tollway Authority announced it would post the names of its top toll violators for all to see. Done. The agency simultaneously announced it would be filing civil lawsuits against some of…

On June 29, if you’ll recall, a DART paratransit van inexplicably plowed into a line of stopped cars on the Tollway. The first question upon seeing the crash was, naturally, What the hell is that driver on? Drugs or a cell phone?. The inside-the-bus video, which showed the driver’s placid…

ATI Career Training Center is the type of school you see advertised on daytime TV. It prepares its graduates for “rewarding careers” in “fields such as health care, personal fitness and wellness, business technology, information technology, automotive repair, air conditioning and refrigeration repair, and welding,” per its website. Three years…

In 2009, Rolanda Dickerson went to Forest Park Medical Center for a tummy tuck. Instead, according to a lawsuit first reported by Courthouse News, Dr. John Alexander gave her a gastric bypass. That was a problem both because the procedure wasn’t what she had agreed to and because Dickerson had…

For the second time in three days, a federal court has called a Texas voting measure as discriminatory. Earlier today, a three-judge panel in D.C. issued an opinion striking down the state’s voter ID law, passed by the legislature last year. The law would require voters to present a valid…

When the Texas legislature passed new redistricting maps in 2011, it sure seemed that the lines had been drawn to dilute the power of Democratic-leaning Hispanic voters in favor of Republicans. State leaders swore that wasn’t the case, but, rather than taking them to an unfriendly Justice Department for a…