WASHINGTON, D.C. – Last week, the Texas Supreme Court ruled in favor of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, blocking politically motivated depositions by former Office of the Attorney General (OAG) employees. The plaintiffs had sued for wrongful termination and attempted to weaponize the civil discovery process against AG Paxton by forcing him to sit for a deposition on matters that had no bearing on the merits of their employment case.
America First Legal (AFL) has repeatedly fought hard to protect our civil and criminal justice system from such conduct and stood firmly with AG Paxton in opposition to this politically motivated lawsuit. On January 30, 2024, AFL filed an amicus brief arguing that the lower court’s decision to compel AG Paxton to sit for an abusively free-wheeling deposition on topics that have nothing to do with the underlying wrongful termination litigation is entirely unwarranted under Texas law and would set a disastrous precedent expanding the scope of discovery. Further, AFL argued that the ruling below improperly injected politics into the resolution of common employment and commercial disputes.
In its ruling, the Texas Supreme Court held that “the trial court abused its discretion in ordering the depositions” when “the only fact issue on which those witnesses are likely to provide information” was uncontested and by failing to consider “the need, likely benefit, and corresponding burden or expense of the requested discovery before issuing an order compelling the depositions.” The Texas Supreme Court cited its “longstanding rules limiting discovery in court proceedings to information that is reasonably expected to aid the dispute’s resolution and further limiting it where the burden of the discovery outweighs the likely benefit in the litigation” and ruled that discovery must “relate to the litigation itself, not to non-litigation objectives that might be advanced by pressing discovery.”
Statement from Reed D. Rubinstein, America First Legal Senior Vice President:
“We are gratified by the Texas Supreme Court’s ruling. Civil discovery in a wrongful termination case should actually relate to the litigation itself; such discovery should not be viewed as if it were merely a variant of the more generalized power of legislative inquisition. AFL is pleased to have supported AG Paxton in this important case,” said Reed D. Rubinstein.
Read the decision here.
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Photo credit: Adobe Stock images/Alexander Berdyugin
