The Betting App Is Still Open on the Kitchen Table
The phone is still unlocked. The betting app is still logged in. The parlay from last night — the one your son placed at 3am after he was supposed to be asleep — is still sitting on the screen, unsettled. The bank alerts show another withdrawal two days ago. The credit card statement you were not supposed to see shows a cash advance from a casino ATM in Shreveport. The counseling intake form is in your email. The suicide note, if there is one, is in your chest.
If any part of that is the room you are sitting in tonight, this page is for you. Not the version of you that wants a brochure. The version that is staring at a phone full of push notifications from a sportsbook and trying to find out, for the first time, whether the company that took his money while their algorithms pushed him back the next morning bears any legal responsibility for what happened to your family.
We are Texas trial lawyers. We have spent twenty-seven years in courtrooms — including federal court — fighting corporate defendants whose products hurt Texans. We are writing this page because the gambling industry has spent the last decade building an addiction machine on Texas soil, and Texas has almost no public infrastructure to treat what that machine produces. Seven U.S. states do not fund problem-gambling treatment. Texas is one of them. The Texas Legislature created a compulsive-gambling program in 1991 in the same session it created the Texas Lottery, then defunded it, then reauthorized it on paper in 2015 with zero dollars appropriated. Six internationally certified gambling counselors practice in the entire state. The hotline that used to take thousands of calls a year was cut off in 2004. If you are looking for someone to sue, you are not crazy. You are the family the state decided not to fund.
What follows is the law, the evidence, and the path — written by the firm that would take your call tonight.
How Texas Went From a $2 Million Compulsive Gambling Program to Zero State Dollars
The story of Texas gambling addiction treatment is the story of a promise made in 1991 and never kept. When the Texas Legislature created the Texas Lottery that year, lawmakers heard warnings that government-sponsored gaming would create a predictable class of compulsive gamblers. Their response was to devote two million dollars a year to a state-run compulsive-gambling program. In its first two years, that program funded treatment for roughly 760 Texans with diagnosable gambling problems and produced two of the most-cited studies of Texas gambling behavior ever published. That was the high-water mark.
Then the defunding began. In 1996, the Legislature cut the program’s funding by more than eighty percent, leaving only enough money to keep a problem-gambling hotline running. In 2004, the hotline itself died when lawmakers dissolved the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse. The statute creating the compulsive-gambling program was removed from the books in 2009. Six years later, in 2015, lawmakers updated the health and human services statutes and revived the program on paper — but with zero state dollars appropriated. The Texas Coalition on Problem Gambling, the state’s leading treatment organization, has operated ever since in the gap between the law’s promise and the budget’s refusal.
“For all those years, thousands and thousands and thousands of Texans have been suffering,” Carol Ann Maner, chair of the Texas Coalition on Problem Gambling, has said. The coalition is now trying to step into that void with help from an unexpected donor: Las Vegas Sands, one of the world’s largest casino companies and the operator with the longest-running Texas legalization footprint, gave the coalition $100,000 in April 2026 to train more certified counselors. The gift will help. It will also fund, in part, a coalition push to convince the Legislature to create a state certification program for gambling-treatment clinicians — a program Louisiana and Oklahoma already have.
Why this matters for your case: the Texas funding collapse is itself evidence. It establishes that the State of Texas has known, on the legislative record since 1991, that gambling creates a class of compulsive gamblers in need of treatment. It establishes that the same legislature that authorized the Texas Lottery recognized the foreseeable harm and bound itself to mitigate it. It establishes that mitigation has been abandoned for thirty years. And it establishes that gambling operators — including those now contributing six-figure donations to the very coalitions that fill the gap they helped create — have benefitted from Texas consumer spending without contributing a dollar to the public-health infrastructure their product requires. That is the legislative record a Texas jury hears in a public-nuisance case.
The New Geography of Texas Gambling — Sportsbooks, Prediction Markets, Daily Fantasy, and Social Casinos
Texas Constitution Article III, § 47 is among the most restrictive gambling prohibitions in the United States. The Texas Penal Code, Chapter 47, narrows the carve-outs to the Texas Lottery, charitable bingo, horse and greyhound racing on licensed tracks, and tribal gaming on reservation land. Sports betting is not authorized. Casino-style gambling is not authorized. Almost everything else, in Texas, is supposed to be illegal.
None of that has slowed what is happening to Texas consumers.
Offshore sportsbooks — DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, Caesars Sportsbook — accept Texas residents as customers despite the state’s prohibition. The platforms operate offshore, take Texas credit cards, and process Texas withdrawals with no Texas regulator reviewing a single line of their marketing code. Daily fantasy sports operators occupy a carve-out under the federal Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (31 U.S.C. §§ 5361-5367) and remain accessible to Texans of all ages. Prediction-market platforms — Kalshi-linked operators, Polymarket-style exchanges — sit in a regulatory gray zone that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has not definitively resolved. Social-casino apps, which use simulated casino games with no cash-out, are widely treated as not-gambling under Texas law even when they train the behavioral patterns of gambling on underage users.
The result is a state with some of the strictest gambling laws on the books and one of the most saturated gambling consumer markets in the country. More than half of U.S. men ages 18 to 49 have an active sportsbook account, according to a Siena Institute study. A Common Sense Media study in January found that more than a third of U.S. boys ages 11 to 17 had already gambled in some way, including online sports betting. Texas contributes disproportionately to both numbers.
“Our kids and our young adults are in a really tough place right now because they just can’t get away from it. It’s nonstop,” Linda Uphoff, a licensed counselor associate who runs a gambling clinic focused on minors and young adults in Dallas, has said. “It’s the sports ads. It’s just everywhere. Like I said, it just pops up on your phone without you asking.”
The Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby made the pattern legible in April when he was diagnosed with gambling disorder and admitted to a rehabilitation facility in Arizona at twenty-two years old. Sorsby had placed more than $90,000 in bets over four years while enrolled at Texas Tech and at two other universities, including bets on his own team while he was playing at Indiana. The Texas sports-radio cycle picked up the story for a week; the broader question of who is legally responsible for the rest of the Sorsbys went unasked.
That question is what we are asking. And the Texas civil-justice system has answers the gambling industry has not yet had to defend against.
When Gambling Kills — Texas Wrongful Death and Survival Law for Compulsive Gamblers
Texas civil law recognizes two related causes of action that apply to gambling-harm deaths and injuries. The first is the wrongful-death action under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code §§ 71.002 and 71.021, brought by the surviving spouse, children, or parents of the deceased for the benefit of the family. The second is the survival action, which vindicates the claims the deceased himself would have had — pain and suffering, mental anguish, property loss — had he lived. Both actions carry a two-year statute of limitations under § 16.003(b) that runs from the date of death. Both can be brought by the personal representative or executor of the estate.
Texas’s wrongful-death statute is, for our purposes, one of the most plaintiff-favorable in the country for two reasons. First, Texas places no statutory cap on noneconomic damages in wrongful-death cases. Other states impose $250,000 or $500,000 limits; Texas does not. Second, Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 71.009 authorizes punitive damages upon proof of malice or gross negligence — and the standard for gross negligence, the conscious-disregard standard articulated in cases like Mobil Oil Corp. v. Ellender, fits an addictive-product-marketed-to-vulnerable-users theory cleanly.
There is one Texas-specific trap on which we will be straight with you from the first call. Texas follows a modified comparative-fault rule under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 33.001. If the trier of fact assigns fifty-one percent or more of the fault to your loved one, your family recovers nothing. That rule is the gambling industry’s single most effective defense lever, and it is the reason case selection matters. We turn down gambling cases where the evidence cannot rebut the personal-responsibility narrative, and we take cases where the addictive-product design, the targeting, the marketing to minors, and the failure to use the responsible-gaming tools the company had built all push fault back where the law puts it.
Texas also recognizes a public-nuisance cause of action codified at Chapter 125 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code. A gambling operator whose products, by design, create a class of addicts whose downstream harm — bankruptcies, family dissolutions, suicides — imposes measurable costs on Texas communities is a textbook public nuisance. Texas’s nuisance law has hosted mass-tort bellwether trials, including the Johnson & Johnson talc litigation that produced a $2.1 billion verdict in Orange County, Texas. The same civil-justice infrastructure that punished one corporate defendant for concealing the harms of its product can hear a case against a gambling operator for designing and marketing the harms of theirs.
Theories of Liability Against Casino and Sportsbook Operators
Five liability theories drive this practice. Each is built on evidence that lives in the operator’s own files.
Product liability — design defect and failure to warn. A sportsbook app is not a passive vending machine. It is a behavioral-engineering product built around variable-ratio reinforcement — the same intermittent-reward schedule the DSM-5 uses as the textbook mechanism of gambling disorder. Push notifications, in-app bonus offers, loss-chasing “free bet” mechanics, and same-game parlay construction are not features. They are designed-in addiction accelerants. Discovery in these cases targets the internal product roadmaps, A/B testing data, and engagement-versus-harm trade-off memos the company would prefer you never see. The failure-to-warn branch attacks the inadequacy of the responsible-gaming disclosures relative to the addictive design — the same theory that drove the early opioid litigation against Purdue Pharma.
Public nuisance (Texas Civil Practice & Remedies Code Chapter 125). The gambling operator whose product, by design, creates a class of addicts that imposes downstream healthcare, family-dissolution, and bankruptcy costs on Texas communities — while the operator accepts those Texans’ wagers without contributing to mitigation — is engaged in the kind of widespread, ongoing harm that Texas nuisance law is built to abate. The 1991 legislative record establishing that Texas itself recognized gambling’s compulsive-addiction harm is the foundation of the public-nuisance case.
Negligent marketing — including targeting minors. Sportsbook and DFS marketing campaigns optimized for engagement metrics have, on the operators’ own data, reached minors. Discovery in these cases targets ad-buy data, lookalike-audience configurations, age-gating bypass rates, and the internal Slack messages where marketing and responsible-gaming teams negotiate how aggressively the company can target eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds without technically violating its own compliance policies. This theory has the same structural shape as the tobacco and opioid marketing cases that produced nine- and ten-figure verdicts in other state courts.
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) — 18 U.S.C. § 1962. If discovery reveals a pattern of racketeering activity — mail or wire fraud through misrepresentations about odds, “risk-free” bet marketing that conceals material conditions, or facilitation of underage wagering in violation of federal law — a RICO enterprise claim can attach. Several pending federal MDLs against online sportsbooks are exploring RICO theories. The treble-damages and attorney’s-fee provisions of RICO make it a serious pressure tool against well-capitalized gaming defendants.
Wrongful death and survival for gambling-related suicide. A 2025 study found that people with diagnosable gambling disorder face an increased risk of suicide comparable to that of major depression. Where a Texan dies by suicide after months or years of documented compulsive gambling on a sportsbook whose product is engineered to maximize engagement, the death is foreseeable to the operator in a legal sense the same way an opioid death is foreseeable to a manufacturer. Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code §§ 71.002 and 71.021 are the vehicle.
Evidence That Disappears Fast — The Preservation Checklist
The single biggest mistake a Texas family can make in a gambling-harm case is to wait. The evidence that wins these cases is the evidence that lives inside the operator’s own systems, and those systems are not designed to keep it. Here is the preservation clock we walk every client through in the first week.
Sportsbook and DFS user-level marketing and engagement data. Platforms purge user-level data on rolling cycles measured in months, sometimes weeks. We file Texas Rule 202 pre-suit petitions in Travis or Harris County to lock the data before it can be aggregated or deleted. Forensic-image orders and spoliation letters go out within seventy-two hours of intake.
DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, and Caesars internal Slack and email. Corporate email retention cycles often run thirty to ninety days. This is the smoking-gun evidence — internal discussions of responsible-gaming budgets, engagement-versus-harm trade-off memos, marketing-versus-compliance disputes — and it is the most time-critical preservation target in the case. We send preservation letters the day you call.
Texas Lottery Commission records. The Commission’s compulsive-gambling-program funding history, internal memos, and legislative-relations files establish the state-created-danger theory and document Texas’s long-standing recognition of gambling harm. We file Public Information Act requests under Texas Government Code Chapter 552 immediately, before responsive documents age out.
Las Vegas Sands and other operator Texas lobbying disclosures. The Texas Ethics Commission maintains PAC contributions and lobbying expenditures as public records. We download and timestamp them in the first week to fix the commercial-interest foundation of the case — including the relationship between Sands’s $100,000 donation and the company’s multi-decade Texas legalization footprint.
Cell-phone forensics, social-media direct messages, and betting-app account data. The victim’s phone is the smoking gun in individual cases — the app logs, the push-notification history, the deposit and withdrawal timestamps. Devices can be replaced, remotely wiped, or lost. We coordinate Cellebrite or GrayKey forensic imaging within days of intake. Do not unlock the phone for the operator’s representatives under any circumstances.
Medical and mental-health treatment records. DSM-5 gambling-disorder diagnoses, suicide-attempt documentation, and the chain of causation from gambling behavior to clinical harm are foundation evidence. HIPAA records can be auto-purged, and providers may resist without subpoena. We engage counsel early and obtain HIPAA-compliant authorizations before records disappear.
911 call records, police reports, and coroner records. Audio recordings of 911 calls and police interviews are routinely purged after ninety to one hundred eighty days at many Texas agencies. Open-records requests for the audio go out the first week. Texas Department of State Health Services death records become public after twenty-five years for vital statistics, but the police and 911 audio is the immediate preservation target.
Why Texas Venues Are Plaintiff-Favorable — Harris, Dallas, Bexar, Travis, and Orange County
Texas is, for these cases, the right state to be in. Three structural reasons.
First, Texas has no statutory cap on noneconomic damages in wrongful-death cases. Other states cap pain-and-suffering recovery at $250,000 or $500,000; Texas does not. That single fact changes the math of every gambling-harm case.
Second, Texas allows punitive damages under § 71.009 upon proof of malice or gross negligence, and Texas juries have demonstrated — most recently in the Johnson & Johnson talc bellwether that produced a $2.1 billion verdict in Orange County, Texas — that they will deliver against corporate defendants when the harm is well-documented and the conduct is egregious. The talc verdict was a products-liability case against a global defendant over a product the company knew was dangerous. The structural similarity to a gambling-operator case built on addictive-product design and concealed harm is exact.
Third, Texas’s metropolitan jury pools — Harris County (Houston), Dallas County (Dallas), Bexar County (San Antonio), Travis County (Austin) — have historically been receptive to well-documented anti-corporate narratives when the plaintiff has the receipts. Voir dire in gambling cases has to be done carefully — the personal-responsibility framing the defense will deploy plays differently in a Bible-Belt jury pool — but the underlying receptivity to corporate accountability is real. Texas juries will punish a company that targeted their children and lied about the harm.
How Our Firm Investigates a Gambling-Harm Case
Attorney911 is a Texas trial firm. Our managing partner, Ralph Manginello, has spent twenty-seven years in courtrooms — including federal court — fighting corporate defendants whose products hurt Texans. He has been admitted to practice since 1998 and has tried cases against companies the size of mountains, including participation in the BP Texas City refinery explosion litigation. The firm has recovered more than $50 million for Texas families since 1998, and Ralph’s background as a journalist before he was a lawyer and as a championship point guard before that shapes how we try cases: as stories the jury can hold, built on evidence we have earned the right to tell.
Our associate attorney, Lupe Peña, came to the plaintiff side after years inside a national insurance-defense firm — the rooms where adjusters decide how to deny, delay, and devalue claims. Lupe knows how corporate claims teams build their defense files because he used to build them. He reads a Colossus-style reserve memo the way a translator reads a foreign language. He is also fully bilingual and serves Texas families in Spanish — Hablamos Español — including the families in the Rio Grande Valley, the border counties, and the Houston and Dallas Latino communities where gambling-harm exposure is rising fastest.
Here is how we investigate a gambling-harm case from intake to filing.
Week one. Rule 202 pre-suit petition in Travis or Harris County. Preservation letters to the operators. Public Information Act requests to the Texas Lottery Commission and Texas Ethics Commission. HIPAA-compliant medical-records authorizations. Cellebrite imaging of the victim’s devices. Intake interview that is confidential, free, and free of judgment — because gambling-harm families have already absorbed enough shame from the rest of the world.
Months two through six. Forensic psychiatry evaluation by a DSM-5 gambling-disorder specialist. Marketing and consumer-protection economist retained for class-certification modeling and damages. Digital forensics expert retained to image devices and analyze platform data architecture. Addiction-medicine epidemiologist retained to establish the population-level harm. Bellwether strategy developed if multiple Texas claimants are emerging — mirroring the J&J talc playbook used in Orange County.
Months six through eighteen. Discovery on the operator’s internal communications. Depositions of marketing, compliance, and product personnel. Expert reports exchanged. Mediation positioning prepared — but not entered until bellwether-strength discovery is in hand. Settling too early in an addiction case forfeits the punitive-damages narrative that drives jury verdicts.
The insurance-coverage pressure tool. Gambling operators carry significant general liability, directors-and-officers, and product-liability coverage towers. Threatening RICO enterprise claims and treble damages elevates the case to the carrier level, which is where resolution pressure is real. Stowers demands are unlikely to be the primary tool against well-capitalized gaming defendants — the carriers are.
Cases of this kind typically take eighteen to thirty-six months from filing to resolution. That is the honest timeline. We will tell you on day one if your case is not strong enough to bring — that is part of our job.
What Texas Families Should Do This Week
If you have read this far, the family member you are calling about is probably still alive and in crisis, or you are grieving, or you are both. The steps below are the same either way.
Do not unlock the victim’s phone for any representative of the sportsbook, the daily fantasy operator, or any “responsible gaming” team that contacts you. Those representatives are claim handlers. Their job is to build a recorded statement they can use against you. Refer them to us.
Do not accept any settlement offer, any “goodwill” payment, any “responsible gaming reimbursement,” or any release. The first offer from an operator is the operator’s acknowledgment that there is a case — at a number designed to close it before you understand what it is worth.
Preserve the device. Power it off. Do not let it auto-update or sync. Bring it to us for Cellebrite imaging.
Pull the bank and credit-card statements. Screenshot the betting-app account history, the deposit list, the withdrawal list, the parlay history. Do not delete the app. Do not close the account. The data is evidence.
Get the DSM-5 evaluation. If the victim is alive, a forensic psychiatrist specializing in behavioral addiction can document the gambling disorder and the chain of causation. If the victim is deceased, the medical records and the toxicology and the coroner’s report establish the rest.
Call us. The consultation is free and confidential, and you pay nothing unless we recover for your family. 1-888-ATTY-911.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sue DraftKings or FanDuel in Texas for my son’s gambling death?
Possibly. Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code §§ 71.002 and 71.021 allow a wrongful-death action by the surviving spouse, children, or parents of a Texan whose death was caused by another’s wrongful act, neglect, or default. Suing an offshore sportsbook requires establishing that the platform’s product design, marketing, or failure-to-warn conduct was a substantial cause of the death. The case is strongest when the deceased had no gambling history before exposure to the platform, when the platform targeted him through push notifications and bonus offers, and when there is medical documentation of DSM-5 gambling disorder. Texas’s two-year statute of limitations under § 16.003(b) runs from the date of death.
What is the statute of limitations on a Texas gambling wrongful-death case?
Two years from the date of death under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 16.003(b). Survival actions also carry a two-year clock. Discovery-rule arguments can extend the deadline in narrow circumstances where the connection between the gambling and the harm was concealed, but you should not assume you have extra time. The two-year clock is firm.
Is gambling addiction recognized as a medical condition in Texas?
Yes. Gambling disorder is a diagnosable condition under the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), and Texas law has recognized compulsive gambling as a legitimate medical disorder since 1991, when the Legislature created the compulsive-gambling program in the same session it created the Texas Lottery. A 2025 study found that people with diagnosable gambling disorder face an increased risk of suicide comparable to that of major depression.
How much is a Texas gambling wrongful-death case worth?
Honest answer: it depends on the facts. For an individual survival or wrongful-death case with documented gambling disorder and a documented suicide, the realistic range runs from $250,000 to several million dollars, depending on the strength of the addiction-causation evidence, the targeting evidence, the operator’s net worth, and the venue. Texas imposes no statutory cap on noneconomic damages in wrongful-death cases and allows punitive damages under § 71.009 upon proof of gross negligence. In a mass-tort or class-action posture against a major sportsbook, aggregate exposure can run into the hundreds of millions. The Johnson & Johnson talc $2.1 billion verdict in Orange County, Texas is proof of what Texas juries will deliver against corporate defendants when the harm is well-documented.
Will my case be forced into arbitration?
Probably the operator will try. Most sportsbook and DFS terms of service contain arbitration clauses buried in app-onboarding paperwork. We challenge those clauses on multiple grounds — unconscionability, lack of meaningful assent, public-policy challenges under Texas law, severability attacks — and Texas courts have not adopted a uniform rule that closes the courthouse door to gambling-harm plaintiffs. Even when arbitration is compelled, the discovery is broader than most clients expect, and the arbitration forum can be selected to favor the plaintiff. The arbitration threat is real but it is not the end of the case.
Can I sue if my loved one was over 18?
Yes, in many circumstances. Adult Texans with documented DSM-5 gambling disorder who were targeted by addictive product design, deceptive marketing, or undisclosed risks can bring product-liability, public-nuisance, and wrongful-death claims against gambling operators just as they could against a pharmaceutical manufacturer whose drug carried undisclosed addiction risks. The defense will argue personal responsibility; our response is the addictive-product design and the operator’s conscious choice to maximize engagement over harm reduction.
What if my loved one had a pre-existing mental health condition?
Texas follows the eggshell-plaintiff rule, which holds that a defendant takes the victim as it finds him. A pre-existing depression or anxiety diagnosis does not bar recovery if the gambling operator’s conduct was a substantial cause of the harm. Discovery will target whether the operator targeted psychologically vulnerable users as a marketing segment — and if it did, the pre-existing condition is precisely what made the targeting actionable.
Is there a class action against DraftKings or FanDuel?
Federal MDL proceedings against online sportsbooks are active and consolidating. Class certification is harder than MDL consolidation, but representative individual bellwether cases — mirroring the Johnson & Johnson talc bellwether playbook — can produce venue-level verdicts that drive mass resolution. We follow the federal dockets and coordinate with co-counsel on bellwether selection.
How long does a Texas gambling lawsuit take?
Honest answer: eighteen to thirty-six months from filing to trial in most cases, with settlement windows opening once bellwether-strength discovery is complete. Cases that settle early usually settle low. Gambling-harm cases that win at trial have, almost without exception, been built on a year or more of pre-suit evidence preservation. Patience is part of the strategy.
What does it cost to hire Attorney911 for a gambling-harm case?
You pay nothing up front. We work on contingency — no fee unless we win. The consultation is free and confidential, available twenty-four hours a day. Hablamos Español. Call 1-888-ATTY-911.
The Phone Is Still on the Kitchen Table
Six certified gambling counselors serve the entire state of Texas. The hotline that used to take thousands of calls a year has been dead since 2004. The compulsive-gambling program the Legislature created in 1991 alongside the Texas Lottery has been defunded, dissolved, revived on paper, and zero-funded across five legislative sessions. The industry that benefits from Texas consumer spending now funds the very coalition that fills the gap the industry helped create. Your family is the predictable output of that policy.
You do not have to wait for Austin to fund a treatment program. You do not have to wait for the sportsbook to develop a conscience. You have the Texas wrongful-death statute, the Texas public-nuisance statute, the Texas products-liability common law, the federal RICO statute, and a civil-justice system that has just delivered a $2.1 billion verdict against one corporate defendant for designing and concealing the harms of its product. The gambling industry has not yet had to defend itself in this state against the case we are prepared to bring. It will.
The consultation is free and confidential. You pay nothing unless we recover. Ralph Manginello and Lupe Peña will be the lawyers who answer. Hablamos Español. Call 1-888-ATTY-911 — tonight, this week, whenever you are ready.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. The information on this page is general legal information, not legal advice for any specific case. Consulting an attorney is the best way to determine your rights.
Related guidance from our library: Our wrongful-death practice overview · Mass-tort and toxic-exposure representation · About Ralph Manginello · About Lupe Peña · Why a personal-injury lawyer matters · What you should never say to a corporate claims handler · Contact our firm.