Steve Mostyn

Template:TOCnestleft Steve Mostyn grew up in the East Texas town of Whitehouse. He was the first in his family to earn a college degree, and then was graduated from South Texas College of Law in 1996. Mostyn established his eponymously named law firm in 1999 and “found success by representing people who wanted to sue their insurance companies, such as those who had mold or foundation problems in their houses or who were denied coverage by their health carriers.”

Mostyn reportedly met his wife, the former Amber Anderson, while volunteering with her at the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, where he previously served as president.

Hurricane Mostyn

When Hurricane Rita swept through Texas in 2005, Mostyn and his law firm aggressively snapped up the cases of homeowners who believed their insurance companies had underpaid them for damages. Mostyn quickly became the premier hurricane lawyer in the Lone Star State, filing 1,200 Rita claims. His strategy was to flood the zone, filing such a torrent of cases that insurance companies would be overwhelmed and decide to settle instead of litigate.

Mostyn followed up on his victories when Hurricane Ike struck Texas on Sept. 13, 2008. At its most powerful, Ike was classified as a Category 4 hurricane while over the ocean. Ike was the costliest hurricane ever to strike Texas. The Insurance Council of Texas reported that “insured losses as a result of the storm totaled $12 billion—$10 billion caused by wind damage and $2 billion caused by flooding.” Ike hit Galveston with 110 mile an hour winds, sending “a 20 foot wall of water over the Bolivar Peninsula and created a rising tide that flooded most of Galveston and many nearby communities along Galveston Bay”.

Ike gave Mostyn a chance to repeat his shock-and-awe approach to litigation that worked so well with Rita. Mostyn’s law firm proposed a $189 million settlement with the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association (TWIA)—the insurer of last resort in vulnerable coastal areas—in a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 2,400 Galveston County homeowners. When the $189 million settlement was accepted, he earned the nickname “Hurricane Mostyn.” His law firm took $86 million in fees for its efforts.

Focus groups

Three million registered African-American and Latino voters stayed home 2010, not to mention the 2 million who were unregistered. Following the crushing Republican victory in 2010, Texas Organizing Project launched an ambitious project to discover, as Crystal Zermeno put it, “who was not voting, and why.”

Texas Organizing Project embarked on a series of intensive focus groups, which were largely financed by Amber Mostyn and Steve Mostyn, a pair of progressive Houston claims attorneys. (Their string of lucrative settlements included some with insurance companies who had balked at paying claims for Ike-related house damage.) Year after year, the Mostyns had loyally stumped up hefty donations to middle-of-the-road Democrats who doggedly pursued existing voters while ignoring the multitude who sat out elections all or most of the time. When TOP asked these reluctant voters about their abstention, the answer was almost always the same: “When I have voted for Democrats in the past, nothing has changed, so it’s not worth my time.” There was one telling exception: in San Antonio, voters said that the only Texas Democrat they trusted was Julian Castro, who ran for mayor in 2009 on a platform of bringing universal pre-K to the city, and delivered on his promise when he won.

Texas Future Project

High-powered Democrats from Texas and California have joined with national labor unions in an effort to mobilize out-of-state donors and raise millions of dollars to build a progressive majority in the Lone Star State that could change state policy and national elections.

The Texas Future Project - that also will seek to convince Texas Democrats to donate here - wants to direct funding to groups that it has identified as working to effect change, from Battleground Texas to Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas.

The project has commitments for close to $1 million, said Houston lawyer Steve Mostyn. He and his wife, Amber Mostyn, are top Democratic donors and part of a small core group of members of the project, which also includes a key California-based supporter of President Obama.

"The main thing ... when we talk to people from out of state, or folks in this state about keeping your money here, is the fact that it's possible - and that if the work is done, and the money is spent, that it's probable, it's actually probable -that you now become a battleground state in 2016 for the presidential race," Steve Mostyn said. "And the long-term effect - once you get a voter to vote once, then twice, then they are pretty much to be there."

Mostyn said the group would "like to raise as much as we can. If it's not doing a few million a year, then it's not really doing what it was designed to do."

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