When Todd Mensing and his trial team at AZA Law took over the SilverBow Resources case, they inherited a damages model worth several hundred million dollars. Mensing cut it down. The McMullen County jury that heard the case in February 2023 awarded $41.8 million, one of the 15 largest verdicts in Texas that year and a result the National Law Journal placed among the country’s top 100 verdicts nationally.
The gap between what the original damages model projected and what Mensing asked for was a deliberate calculation about the jury he would face.
SilverBow Resources Operating LLC and co-plaintiff El Dorado Gas & Oil, Inc. sued ETC Field Services, an Energy Transfer subsidiary, alleging that hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide injected into an underground disposal well had migrated into their mineral leases, disrupted drilling plans, and forced well abandonments. The case had been in litigation since 2014 and survived two trips to the Texas Supreme Court before AZA entered the picture after remand.
By that point, years of expert analysis and geological modeling had produced a damages figure in the hundreds of millions. Mensing saw a problem with that number, and it didn’t have anything to do with the science behind it.
“One of the most important strategic decisions we made was recognizing our audience,” Mensing said in a published interview. “It was a conservative venue, so we scaled back our damages model to a number that felt commensurate with the scale of the defendant’s wrongdoing. Our damages number didn’t feel like a money grab; it felt tethered to a just result.”
McMullen County has roughly 600 residents. Tilden, the county seat, sits in the middle of South Texas brush country, and there aren’t many places in Texas where a jury pool is drawn from a community that small. Mensing described the calculus plainly: “When we took over that case, there was a damages model of several hundred million dollars. We scaled that back to maintain credibility.”
The decision to reduce the ask shaped more than the closing argument. It set the terms for how Todd Mensing presented expert testimony, structured the damages framework, and framed the moral argument to the jury.
Mensing built his trial narrative around responsibility rather than a dollar figure. He told the Texas Lawbook after the verdict that SilverBow was positioned as the party that had identified the contamination risk and developed a plan to keep producing minerals despite it. Energy Transfer, in his framing, refused to acknowledge that its injection operations had created the problem.
That narrative required precision at every level. Testimony from petroleum engineers, geologists, and economic damages experts was calibrated to a number the jury could absorb without skepticism. The trial ran two weeks and involved more than a dozen expert witnesses on both sides. After roughly five hours of deliberation, the jury awarded SilverBow $24.5 million for lost net revenues from future wells and costs associated with plugging and abandoning existing ones. El Dorado received $17.3 million for similar categories of damage.
The jury rejected the claim that Energy Transfer’s conduct constituted gross negligence, a finding that limited damages to compensatory rather than punitive levels. Even so, the $41.8 million combined award couldn’t be dismissed as a modest result. It placed the case among the largest oil and gas trespass verdicts in recent Texas history.
Two moments during testimony exposed weaknesses in Energy Transfer’s position. The first came during cross-examination of the defense’s own subsurface modeling experts, when Mensing got them to acknowledge that their predictive models didn’t reflect real-world conditions.
“The first big crack was when we got their experts to admit that their models do not reflect the real world. And it was that stark,” Mensing told the Texas Lawbook.
The second turning point came from AZA partner Cameron Byrd. Energy Transfer had argued that SilverBow and El Dorado could simply drill around the contamination plume. On cross-examination, Byrd pressed a defense expert until the witness conceded that requiring the plaintiffs to alter their drilling operations was itself a form of interference with their mineral rights.
“Cameron Byrd pointed out on cross that that’s admitting interference, because it’s making us do something differently than we have the right to do, which is drill the way we want,” Mensing said. “It was very crystallized in that moment, he pointed out even those measures would cost money.”
Judge Janna Whatley signed the final judgment on April 19, 2023, in Case No. M-14-0029-CV-C in the 343rd District Court of McMullen County. The National Law Journal listed the result among the country’s top 100 verdicts for 2023, and a second publication independently placed it on a parallel national list.
Energy Transfer filed a notice of appeal on July 14, 2023. The case went to the Fourth Court of Appeals in San Antonio. Todd Mensing continues with the matter as it moves through appellate proceedings.
There is a reason why people living abroad learn the local language much quicker than those studying it at home.…
Introduction Visualize yourself studying at your own home in Hyderabad, having an online session, deliberating on a business plan with…
Seeing your dog suddenly eating grass like crazy can feel alarming, especially when the behavior starts out of nowhere. One…
As the global energy structure undergoes a profound transformation toward decarbonization, high-frequency inverters are becoming increasingly important for improving the…
There is a quiet but decisive shift underway in how global enterprises build, run, and reinvent themselves. For two decades,…
If your iPhone sticker drawer feels messy, you may want to remove old stickers, photo stickers, Memoji stickers, recent stickers,…