Still a crook any way you look
Roblox Corp. will face off against Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) in King County, Texas — home to about 265 people and the latest unconventional venue choice for the Lone Star state’s top lawyer.
The Nov. 6 petition accusing the popular video game of facilitating child sex trafficking joins divorce proceedings and custody battles as one of fewer than 10 active cases in the district court.
“We’ve never had anything like this before,” said district clerk Jammye Timmons.
But King County, five hours from Paxton’s Austin office, is just the latest tiny Texas location to earn a blockbuster filing from Paxton.
Days before the suit, Paxton went to Panola County, with 22,000 residents, and sued Johnson & Johnson and Kenvue for an unproven claim that Tylenol causes autism in children.
Two of his biggest victories—a $1.4 billion settlement from Meta and a $1.375 billion settlement from Google to resolve two cases—were secured in Harrison, Midland, and Victoria counties—all less than 200,000 residents. Paxton has brought 11 cases to Harrison County alone—whose population is less than 2% of Harris County’s, the state’s most populous.
Although Paxton has long been accused of judge shopping in single judge divisions in federal courts, little attention has been given to his venue choices in state court. The counties are by-and-large extremely conservative places where Paxton’s politics are popular. Only six of 135 voters in King County went for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump in the presidential election, presenting a jury pool that’s more likely to have negative feelings toward Big Pharma and Big Tech.
“That’s very dangerous if you’re a defendant,” said David Coale, an appellate attorney with Lynn Pinker Hurst & Schwegmann.
Additionally, the counties Paxton’s turning to typically have only one district court judge, always a Republican who’s guaranteed to get the case—a feature urban courthouse in the state largely can’t provide.
Judge LeAnn Rafferty, who touted her membership in the National Rifle Association when running for office in 2016, will oversee the Tylenol case. Of Rafferty, who also hears criminal matters, “I think she was surprised to get the lawsuit,” said her friend, Michelle Slaughter, a Republican former judge on Texas’ high criminal court.
I wondered about this when I saw the news of the Roblox filing. I have to assume that they will fight to get the case moved to another court (in addition to getting it thrown out), but as this story notes that’s not so easy to do. State law allows for a filing “in the county where at least a substantial part of the events in the complaint occurred or in the county of the defendant’s main office”. Assuming Roblox doesn’t have its headquarters in King County, I presume Paxton will have to show that there are kids there that play Roblox. I guess? It’s such a small county I’m not sure one can take that as a given. We’ll see.
By the way, on the Tylenol case, which I hadn’t realized was in Panola County, so far it’s not quite been the concierge experience that perhaps Paxton might have anticipated. Good, I say.
Oh, and since Ken Paxton is involved, there’s always a grift angle.
Paxton’s connection to 68,000-person Harrison County runs through a decorated lawyer in the community named Samuel Baxter. A former Texas state district judge, Baxter was also once the county’s district attorney.
“He has an extraordinary record of success in those courts and all across the state,” Coale said. “He’s the real deal.”
Harrison County, along the border with Louisiana, is a popular venue choice federally for patent litigation. But Baxter, now with McKool Smith, appears to have introduced Paxton to the county for state litigation in 2020. That May McKool Smith filed a pair of lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies Shire PLC and Gilead Sciences that Paxton joined.
In the years since, they teamed up in six more cases—five against major pharmaceutical companies, the other against Meta. All were assigned to Judge Brad Morin, who as a practicing lawyer was the named partner in a firm that employed one of Baxter’s partners at McKool Smith.
AstraZeneca, who Paxton and Baxter sued for Medicaid fraud, is looking to get out of Harrison County and has asked a state appeals court to remove the case after Morin said no. In March, the same appeals court granted a transfer request in a different case from Sanofi-Aventis over Morin’s ruling to keep it.
Morin is scheduled to preside over jury trials in three Paxton cases in 2026.
The work with Texas has proved lucrative for Baxter: McKool Smith billed the state $46 million in fees and expenses for helping secure a $1.4 billion settlement from Meta for the misuse of users’ facial recognition data.
Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, et cetera. Like the shark’s need to always be in motion, if Ken Paxton isn’t working an angle he risks dying.