San Antonio lawyer Thomas J. Henry can no longer advertise $1.25 billion verdict

San Antonio personal injury lawyer Thomas J. Henry can no longer advertise a $1.25 billion “verdict/judgment” that he secured for an alleged sexual assault victim without disclosing that the client didn’t actually get anything. In response to a Henry billboard trumpeting the verdict, the Texas Supreme Court recently amended a rule on lawyers’ advertising. It now requires attorneys who obtained a verdict but never collected anything to disclose that fact. Last fall, Henry began advertising the $1.25 billion result for an alleged sexual assault victim on a billboard just north of downtown. The plaintiff subsequently told the San Antonio Express-News that he never got so much as a penny from the judgment, though that was omitted from the billboard.

The verdict was actually a 2018 default judgment, meaning the case wasn’t adjudicated on its merits because neither the defendant nor his lawyer appeared at trial. Henry and attorney Travis Venable, who both represented the plaintiff, didn’t respond to a request for comment Monday. Henry has replaced the advertisement on the billboard with another promoting a $50 million “recent result.” The client, who suffered a brain injury in a trucking accident, pocketed $27 million, according to the billboard. The Supreme Court issued a Jan. 31 order amending a rule dealing with “communications concerning a lawyer’s services” after receiving a recommendation from the State Bar of Texas’ Committee on Disciplinary Rules and Referenda. The committee took up the matter in early January after Vincent R. Johnson, a member and professor at St. Mary’s University School of Law, read about the billboard in an Express-News article in December.