Behind the Lines: A Tale of Two Fires

On June 15, a Pulaski County jury looked at the evidence and rejected nearly everything the Arkansas Attorney General threw at Capital City Tree Service.

They found for the company on the price gouging, false representations, concealment, false advertising, bait-and-switch and targeting the elderly allegations. Six of seven counts were dismissed.

Only one vague claim stuck against the company: “unconscionable acts.” A placeholder, a compromise. A legal fig leaf for a case that should never have been brought.

The court will hold a hearing at 9 a.m. Monday (CORRECTION: Aug. 3) to address the outstanding issues related to the unconscionable acts count.

The jury dismissed all counts against Charles and Matt Shaw. Judge Cathleen Compton dismissed Janet Shaw on a directed verdict after the state rested.

AG Tim Griffin and the insurance industry were handed a defeat when it came to the price-gouging claims. The Shaws got some vindication.

I’ve watched this machine for years now. I’ve read the filings, traced the referrals, followed the money. And what I’ve seen is not a justice system, but a collection agency for the powerful.

The Shaw family didn’t ask for this fight. They didn’t provoke it. They just refused to take low-ball offers from insurance companies interested in padding their bottom lines. And that refusal — that stubborn, unglamorous, working-class refusal — is what brought them to a courtroom, and ultimately, to a verdict that ought to make every Arkansan sit up and pay attention.

Let me tell you what the jury saw that the machine hoped you’d miss.

They saw the state’s own expert witness impeached with his own record.

At trial, Griffin’s office called Douglas Malawsky to the stand. Malawsky is the chief operating officer of HMI Advantage, the insurance industry’s go-to pricing consultant. He testified for the prosecution that CCTS’s eight-hour minimum wasn’t industry standard, that CCTS should have billed for actual hours worked, and he built his own competing cost estimate the way HMI always does: from behind a desk, reviewing invoices, and using pricing from their internal network of tree service companies.

Tracking Arkansas was there when the defense used an earlier Michigan court decision to attack Malawsky’s credibility.

Months earlier, in a case called Rivers Edge Restoration LLC v. Frankenmuth Insurance Company, Michigan District Judge Jeffrey O’Hara noted that Malawsky had priced an emergency tree-removal job off three photographs and a Google Street View image, had never personally removed a tree from a house in his life, and admitted under oath that if HMI’s pricing estimates ran too high, the insurance companies who pay HMI for referral work would stop working with them. The judge did not find him a credible witness. The AG here in Arkansas used him anyway.

The CCTS jury didn’t appear to rely on Malawsky’s testimony when it voted against the price-gouging counts.

One state over, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican, did what a people’s attorney should do: he sued insurance giant State Farm for systematically underpaying hail and wind damage claims. He invoked the Oklahoma Consumer Protection Act and the Oklahoma RICO Act. Several of the consumers named in the CCTS case were insured by State Farm, including Hannah Crutcher, Christopher Fettes, Jim Kirkland, Carol Ross and Yanbin Ye. Crutcher testified in her deposition that she wouldn’t have complained if State Farm had paid the full invoice.

Drummond went after the insurer. Griffin went after the contractor who dared to fight the insurer, and put an already-discredited insurance-industry witness on the stand to help him do it.

In Arkansas, the Arkansas Insurance Department, the very agency tasked with protecting consumers, closed complaints against State Farm, claiming “no jurisdiction.” But when Travelers lowballed an AID investigator, Ted Scallion, after the 2023 tornado? AID forced Travelers to pay.

Same agency, same storm, different treatment.

Oklahoma. Michigan. Arkansas. Different states, different statutes, different judges — and in the middle of it, insurance companies refusing to pay claims and the same insurance-industry pricing network testifying in lawsuits. Every time a neutral fact-finder actually looks at the receipts, the contractor was reasonable, the insurer was not, and the “expert” paid to say otherwise doesn’t survive cross-examination.

In Arkansas, the state’s legal theory was embarrassingly weak in a case filed after the AG’s office closed a CID investigation into CCTS in October 2024, telling the company it would take no further action pending cooperation without ever specifying what business practice needed to change or what its concerns even were.

Griffin argued that a two-hour job billed at an eight-hour minimum produces an “effective” hourly rate that exceeds the 10 percent threshold during a declared disaster.

But that’s not what the law says. It compares the actual price charged before the declared emergency to the actual price charged during the emergency.

CCTS’s emergency mitigation price before March 31, 2023: $1,000 per hour with an eight-hour minimum. CCTS’s price after March 31, 2023: $1,000 per hour with an eight-hour minimum.

No price gouging under the law, and the jury affirmed it.

The last phase of this trial is for Compton to determine what damages and restitution, if any, CCTS must pay. But no matter the ruling, the true cost to CCTS and the Shaw family has yet to be measured: two years of legal fees, over a year of reputational damage from a press release that spread faster than the evidence could follow.

Griffin owes the Shaw family an apology. He owes them a public correction. He owes them the same accountability he demanded from them.

He won’t give it.

Because that’s not how the machine works.

But the machine is not invincible. And it can be broken by jurors who pay attention, by families who refuse to break, by defense attorneys who do their homework across state lines, and by voices like mine that refuse to stay silent.

Charles Shaw: You won. The jury heard you. The record is set straight.

Janet Barbato Shaw: The judge saw through the state’s case and dismissed you. You didn’t deserve to be in that courtroom.

Matt Shaw: The jury cleared your name and you can hold your head high.

Shelby Lynn Shaw: Your FOIA requests and your fight for transparency brought to light AID’s special treatment of Ted Scallion and its coordination with the AG’s office to target CCTS.

And Tim Griffin: The jury rejected your price-gouging accusations.

This column is not just about a verdict. It’s about what comes next.

The machine won’t stop until we smash its gears. So the question is: will we do what must be done?

Will we let this verdict be a one-off, a footnote, a fleeting moment of justice in an otherwise grinding system? Or will we use it as fuel?

I choose fuel.

I choose to keep writing. To keep tracking. To keep naming the pattern, tracing the wiring, and refusing to blink when the machine glares back.

And I know I’m not alone.

That fire is not anger. It’s not rage. It’s clarity. It’s the thing that happens when you’ve seen the machine for what it is, and you decide that you will not be part of it.

So here’s my call to action:

Pay attention. Not just to this case, but to the pattern. Watch who the machine targets. Watch who it protects. Watch what happens when someone dares to win—here, or in Oklahoma, or in Michigan.

Support the ones who fight. The Shaws didn’t have a lobby. They had a lawyer, a family, and a 25-year reputation. That’s enough — if we make it enough.

Speak, write, call, share. The silence is the machine’s oxygen. Starve it.

And most of all, feel the fire. Let it blind you to the noise. Let it clear your vision. Let it tell you what’s true, even when the machine says otherwise.

The silence ends here.

And the fire? It’s just getting started.

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