IN-THE-NEWS
Tulsa Litigator Tops Libel Award Record
Trial lawyer Gary Richardson, name partner of Tulsa’s seven-lawyer Richardson & Meier, says he has won record jury awards in nine counties in Texas and Oklahoma and the largest wrongful termination award-$1.5 million against American Airlines-in Oklahoma. But on April 20 he far surpassed those distinctions when a Waco, Texas, jury awarded his client $58 million-the biggest libel judgment in U.S. history.
In 1985 Dallas television station WFAA broadcast a series that accused Richardson’s client Vic Feazell, then district attorney for McClennan County, of taking bribes to drop drunk driving charges. As a result of the series, Richardson contends, Feazell was indicted in 1986 on federal charges of racketeering, bribery, and mail fraud. Defended by Richardson, Feazell was acquitted in 1987 and resigned as district attorney to go into private practice.
Meanwhile, Richardson had sued WFAA and the reporter involved for libel on Feazell’s behalf in 1986, claiming that the series was either recklessly or deliberately false. After a six-week trial ending April 19, the jury agreed.
WFAA, represented by Dallas’s 173-lawyer Locke Purnell Rain Harrell, plans to appeal.
For Richardson, 50, who served as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Oklahoma from 1981 to 1984, the victory is par for the course. He says he has lost only two of more than 50 civil suits in nine years of private practice. If the verdict is upheld, he stands to collect his biggest contingent fee ever: 40-50 percent of $58 million. “It’ll be very lucrative.” He says.
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