In 2011, the Texas Legislature handed people who’d been improperly solicited by lawyers an extremely powerful weapon: The prospective clients could now sue attorneys who violated the state’s criminal barratry statute and collect $10,000 per violation for their efforts.
It was the perfect solution to one of the least prosecuted crimes in Texas. Prosecutors and the State Bar of Texas rarely bothered filing the hard-to-prove cases, allowing barratry to run rampant among the state’s less ethical attorneys, who illegally contact clients before they are asked—or pay someone else to. So what better way to clamp down on the practice than simply giving victims the ability to sue the very lawyers who’d bothered them?
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