four-day trial <\/a>was an uncommon courtroom dissection of barratry, which legal experts say is rampant across Texas but difficult to prove. Allegations rarely reach a civil or criminal jury.\u00a0<\/p>\nTom Carse, Marshall\u2019s attorney, told the jury it was the law firm\u2019s lead generation company, owned by Hollywood producer Robert Paschall, that called the crash victim without his consent. He pointed to the call transcript, which is incomplete and begins with Paschall\u2019s screener Elle Hart thanking Marshall for holding before sending him to Loncar Lyon Jenkins.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The law firm emailed him a contract minutes later, which he did not sign.<\/p>\n
Carse said the liftyouup.org intake form Paschall obtained from the website to confirm Marshall clicked a link and provided his cell number was \u201ca fiction\u201d because it has no authentication or metadata proving it to be real.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cWhere in this document does Barry Marshall say ‘I want somebody to contact me and talk to me about a lawyer?’ It\u2019s not there,\u201d\u00a0Carse said.<\/p>\n
In an interview after the trial, Carse said he believes liftyouup.org was created by Paschall to put degrees of separation between the contact with the crash victim and the law firm\u2019s lead generator\u00a0\u2014 but he said he could not obtain the evidence to connect those dots to the jury.<\/p>\n
Paschall said there\u2019s no truth to that: \u201cI\u2019m glad the jury saw what we\u2019ve been seeing.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Susan]()
<\/p>\n
Susan Gray-Frank shows a photo of the wreck that totaled her husband Barry Marshall\u2019s truck last year, Wednesday, March 26, 2025 in Stephenville. Marshall unsuccessfully sued Dallas County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins’ law firm for illegal solicitation, or barratry. A jury on Thursday found the firm not liable.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Shafkat Anowar\/Staff Photographer<\/p>\n
It\u2019s illegal for attorneys or their intermediaries to contact a crash victim within 31 days of an accident to drum up their business. But law firms may hire lead generators to bring them potential clients who are seeking legal help.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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The state ethics commission has not issued guidance for attorneys on these referral services in 20 years, and since then social media has unlocked lead generation tactics that get entangled in allegations of barratry.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Marshall, 77, a retired welder, testified he did not click any link or ask anybody to call him on April 11, 2024 to refer him to an attorney.<\/p>\n
The initial lawsuit Carse filed in June 2024 included Marshall\u2019s wife as a plaintiff because she alleged she also received a solicitation call after the crash. Susan Gray-Frank was not in the accident but her name was on the truck\u2019s title.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Her affidavit states she got a call from a man named Sean from liftyouup.org who offered to help get a larger insurance payout before she declined and hung up. Court filings included a screenshot of a text she received with a link to the website.\u00a0<\/p>\n
By the time the case got to trial this week, Erath County District Court Judge Jason Cashon had dismissed her from the complaint and the text message was not brought up in court. Cashon dismissed Paschall as an individual defendant during the trial but kept the law firm and Paschall\u2019s lead generation business.<\/p>\n
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Marshall\u2019s affidavit also states he got a call two days after his crash from\u00a0liftyouup.org. But while testifying this week, the Vietnam War veteran said he did not remember who exactly called him.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a 22-minute phone call he could have hung up on at any point in time but he clicked and asked to receive that information and that\u2019s why he stayed on the phone,\u201d Mark Torian, an attorney representing the law firm\u2019s lead generator, told the jury. \u201cThat\u2019s him reaching out for it, that\u2019s not solicitation.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not clear when liftyouup.org transferred Marshall to Hart, Paschall\u2019s screener, because there is no audio or transcript of that portion. But Paschall confirmed that five minutes into the call Hart\u00a0emailed Marshall a copy of his crash report from the Texas Department of Transportation. Marshall testified he didn\u2019t know she did so until after the call.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Asked during a deposition in 2024 why liftyouup.org would send his lead generation business a free lead when he has no connection to the website,\u00a0Paschall said \u201cI have no idea.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
On Tuesday Paschall told the jury he learned last week Sean already had Hart\u2019s phone number to send her Marshall\u2019s call because the two had known each other for years.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Paschall told the jury he produces advertisements for law firms through targeted marketing on social media and Google.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After Marshall declined to sign the contract with\u00a0Loncar Lyon Jenkins, Gray-Frank said she talked with an attorney trusted by a colleague. Frenkel & Frenkel then referred the couple to Carse for a potential barratry claim.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Carse lost a similar barratry lawsuit earlier this year against Paschall and Loncar Lyon Jenkins in Smith County. At least two others he filed against them in the past few years were dropped while one remains pending.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In court filings, attorneys representing the law firm have accused Carse of filing frivolous barratry lawsuits as \u201can extortive money grab,\u201d which he denies.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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During closing statements, Carse said the law firm and lead generator preyed on Marshall while Taylor pointed to Carse as the predator.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Barry Marshall, who unsuccessfully sued Dallas County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins’ law firm for illegal solicitation, poses for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":419000,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103,99553,89138],"class_list":["post-418999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-tp-clay-jenkins","tag-tp-dallas-county"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418999\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/419000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}