HOUSTON – Texas trial lawyer Mikal Watts has been non-suited from litigation brought over identity theft following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Last September, plaintiff’s attorney Mikal Watts was indicated on allegations that he committed fraud when purportedly signed up 44,550 coastal clients after the disaster. The following month, the indictment was unsealed.
He was acquitted in August.
The original petition, which sought $100 million in exemplary damages, named as defendants Texas attorneys John Cracken and Bob Hilliard and alleged they used case runners to steal the identities of Vietnamese-Americans damaged by spill.
Watts as added as a defendant in a recently amended petition and then non-suited only weeks later on Sept. 13, court records show.
The indictment refers to the involvement of two unnamed attorneys, which, according to the lawsuit, are presumably Cracken, of The Cracken Law Firm, and Hilliard, of Hilliard Munoz Gonzales LLP.
Plaintiff Thim Nguyen, a Louisiana resident, claims to be one of “tens of thousands of victims” whose names and identities “were egregiously stolen or conspired to be stolen” by the two defendant attorneys.
The lawsuit was filed March 3 in Harris County District Court.
Case No. 2016-13749