My new essay at The Hill explains the details of Alex Jones’s recent comeuppance in a Texas trial court, when two years of his cell phone texts and other records were mistakenly disclosed to the plaintiffs’ lawyer in a Sandy Hook libel case.
Here is the gist:
Alex Jones’s well-deserved reckoning
by Steven Lubet, Opinion Contributor – 08/10/22 8:00 AM ET
Many states, including Texas, have therefore enacted “claw-back” or “snap-back” provisions, allowing attorneys to require the destruction or deletion of inadvertently disclosed materials. Texas law gives sending lawyers 10 days to act, beginning when they discover the mistake, but it applies only to legally privileged documents and communications.
Bankston was holding a bonanza of potentially compromising information, but he needed to make sure the 10-day clock was running. He immediately wrote to Reynal, informing him that the disclosure seemed “to contain a lot of confidential information,” adding, “my assumption is that you did not intend to send us this. Let me know if I am correct.”
In a foolish economy of words, Reynal tersely replied, “Please disregard the link and I will work on resending.”
Several states have an additional ethics rule, requiring the receiving lawyer to abide by the sender’s instructions. Many others follow the American Bar Association’s Model Rule of Professional Conduct 4.4(b), requiring notice to the sender, with a comment suggesting that a receiving lawyer may “voluntarily return such a document or delete electronically stored information.”
Texas, however, has no ethics rule at all covering the receipt of inadvertently disclosed material. Bankston had no duty even to inform Reynal of his mistake – though he wisely chose to trigger the 10-day clock – and no obligation to “disregard” Jones’s cell phone data once the grace period expired.
Jones began sweating when Bankston informed him that his text messages had been given to plaintiffs’ counsel, and his defense lawyer “did not take any steps to identify it as privileged or protect it in any way,” pointedly adding, “And that is how I know you lied to me when you said you didn’t have text messages about Sandy Hook.”
It will be exquisite poetic justice if the nation’s foremost pusher of bogus conspiracies ends up exposing a real conspiracy to subvert the 2020 presidential election. And more ironic still because Texas’s loose legal ethics rules made it possible.
Jones had already been defaulted on liability, so the trial was limited to compensatory and punitive damages. You can read about that and other details, including the devastating cross examination, in the entire essay at The Hill.