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.
Paxton’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment about its strategy in picking counties.
Substantial Events Occurred
In Texas, a plaintiff must file a lawsuit 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.
That provides flexibility to file “where they deem it most advantageous as long as it fits within those parameters,” said John Browning, a former Republican state appeals court justice.
Though some companies have opposed and gotten their cases moved to bigger counties, Paxton has mostly succeeded in keeping the litigation out of major cities.
Johnson County, just south of Fort Worth with a population of 180,000, was Paxton’s choice to sue 3M and DuPont for misrepresenting the safety of products that contain chemicals. A federal court where the defendants removed the case sent it back to Johnson County at Paxton’s request in September.
It was there, Paxton’s lawyers wrote in the lawsuit, that “transactions forming the basis of this suit occurred,” without elaborating.
Bastrop County hosted Paxton’s challenge to online postings from Yelp that he says discriminate against pro-life pregnancy centers. Only one such business in the county is featured on Yelp but that was enough to try the case there.
“I don’t want to call it gamesmanship but it’s certainly a tactical decision,” Browning said.
Harrison County
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.
Baxter didn’t respond to a request for comment about his joining Paxton in suits in Harrison County.
Last month, he and Paxton entered into a new agreement to sue Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis US for deceptively marketing the anti-platelet drug Plavix.
They haven’t filed the case.
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