The Abbot's Tale

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Forty years ago this week, a 26-year-old law school graduate named Greg Abbott was out jogging on the streets of River Oaks when a tree snapped and fell, paralyzing him from the waist down. Abbott, in the midst of studying for the bar, sued the tree owner and later the tree-trimming company that had neglected the 75-year-old tree. He won a multimillion-dollar settlement, the details of which remained private for years.Decades later, Abbott campaigned to install tort reform curtailing "frivolous" lawsuits and succeeded. Abbott's critics claimed that he helped usher in a Texas significantly less friendly to plaintiffs seeking damages like the ones Abbott won. Looking back on the case 40 years later, Don Riddle, Abbott's personal injury lawyer at the time, agrees that Texas has changed."It would be next to impossible to get the kind of settlement we got," Riddle told Chron Monday. Tort reform, or as Riddle calls it, "tort deform," has severely capped the kind of damages individuals can seek out, and Riddle doesn't see that changing in Texas anytime soon. So how did we get here, and how did Abbott come to turn against the legal mechanism that made him millions?https://www.chron.com/politics/article/greg-abbott-tree-lawsuit-explained-19574621.php