Jury Grants Client Every Cent Requested in Another AZA Business Court Victory 

HOUSTON – A jury granted SmartDisk, a Houston-based deposition and video production company, a breach of contract win over the private equity firm that purchased national court reporting service Lexitas.  

The jury awarded SmartDisk $6.4 million in damages for breach of the agreement and $3.5 million in legal fees, with a provision to pay another $230,000 for an appeal.  

The jury found that Lexitas, which had been purchased by a series of private equity firms, promised to exclusively use SmartDisk for its Texas work but breached that agreement by sending the work to a Missouri company instead. 

SmartDisk is not the first AZA client to fare well in Texas business court trials. AZA previously won the first two trials in the Texas business courts. In one, AZA’s oil company client beat a $26.5 million claim. In the second trial, AZA saved another energy sector client $200 million. 

AZA took this case on contingency for SmartDisk, a smaller and highly innovative company that was victimized by private equity firms that bought its court reporting business partner and then ignored its contractual obligations.  

“I think that private equity does some good things, but it has the potential to do a lot of bad things,” AZA co-founder and case lead lawyer John Zavitsanos told Texas Lawbook after the verdict. “It’s destroyed a lot of jobs. It’s destroyed a lot of businesses. It’s this get-rich-quick, get-in-get-out, without regard for the consequences of what happens.”  

“This man and his partner literally spent the better part of 35 years of their life … building this business, and when it got to a point where they weren’t needed anymore, they got kicked to the curb,” Mr. Zavitsanos told the reporter in “Biz Court Jury Sides with Deposition Video Producer in Fight with Ex-Business Partner” (subscription required). He tried the case with AZA lawyers Jason McManis, Kelsi White, Matt Davis and Savannah Ezelle. 

The case in the 11th division of the Business Court of Texas is Smartdisk LLC v. Deposition Solutions, LLC d/b/a Lexitas, case number is 25-BC11B-0022. It was the first business court trial before Judge Grant Dorfman.  

Houston and Dallas trial boutique Ahmad Zavitsanos & Mensing, or AZA, has earned repeated recognition from Chambers USA among the best in Texas for our commercial law, intellectual property and appellate practices; the firm has been listed by Best Lawyers’ Best Law Firms as one of the country’s best commercial litigation firms for 13 years; has been named Litigation Department of the Year by Texas Lawyer three times; and was dubbed a Texas Powerhouse law firm by Law360.