Texas Trial Lawyer Watch
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Download PDF of entire report (1.5 MB)
Texas Trial Lawyer Watch monitors the flow of trial lawyer funds through the Texas political system, making certain that Texas voters know who is giving and who is receiving trial lawyer money.
Hiding Their Influence is an examination of the massive influence that a small group of plaintiff lawyers—known commonly as trial lawyers—exert on Texas’ political system through their injection of millions of dollars in contributions. This website presents the introductions to each of the report's 6 chapters. You can download a PDF of any individual chapter or the entire report. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the PDFs.
The research involved in compiling the financial contributions detailed in this report required extensive unraveling of reports on file at the Texas Ethics Commission. Accurately tracking the monetary influence of Texas’ most prominent trial lawyers is extremely difficult. While it is possible to search state records for contributions by a single individual, simply reporting those financial totals would seriously understate the extent of that person’s contributions.
It is clear that the wealthiest and most politically active trial lawyers in Texas carry out the bulk of their milliondollar campaign finance work quietly: creating a series of PACs with noble or innocuous names; dumping massive contributions into those PACs—often extremely late in a campaign cycle to avoid preelection public disclosure; and then shuttling the money among those front PACs—and even the Texas State Democratic Party—before it ends up in the hands of their favored candidates.