A Pennsylvania-based commercial real estate firm has purchased land near Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport for construction of an industrial building project.

Liberty Property Trust bought 43 acres at Valley View Lane and Frye Road south of D/FW Airport.

Liberty said it has the potential to build 750,000 square feet of industrial space on the property.

“This is a great time to enter the Southwest market and this parcel offers excellent accessibility,”  said Mike Heise, vice president and city manager for Liberty’s Dallas region. “The market is strong and the acquisition provides a new platform for development.”

Liberty owns more than 1.86 million square feet of industrial space in the Dallas area.

Based in Malvern, Penn., Liberty has 105 million square feet of office, distribution and light manufacturing properties in the U.S. and Britain.

WASHINGTON—U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap ordered Trinity Industries and the plaintiff who won his case in federal court earlier this month to try one last time to settle their differences.

Gilstrap ordered both the company and plaintiff Josh Harman to mediation led by Duke University professor Francis McGovern, He set a Dec. 31 deadline for an agreement.

If no agreement is reached, the judge will have to decide how much Trinity will be ordered to pay — and likely a host of other questions expected to be raised by competing motions from the parties.

A jury found Oct. 13 that Trinity had violated the False Claims Act because it failed to tell the Federal Highway Administration of money-saving changes it had made to guardrails in 2005. Those guardrail systems are in use on highways across the country, including in Texas. State highway departments have paid $175 million in federal dollars for them since 2005.

The company believes the jury was wrong and has vowed to appeal.

Jeff Eller, a spokesman for Trinity, said the company will comply with the judge’s order, but continues to feel the verdict was wrong as a matter of law.

“Trinity continues to believe that the jury decision cannot and will not withstand legal scrutiny. We intend to follow the court instructions and attend mediation,” Eller said.

An attorney for Josh Harman, the competitor to Trinity who brought the suit on behalf of the federal government, said the mediation could touch on any part of the case. Both sides are likely to file a storm of post-trial motions, and the mediation likely is the judge trying to give a settlement one more chance.

Beyond the question of whether the jury was right in nits verdict, other complicated issues remain in dispute as well. For instance: If no settlement is reached, how much will the judge order the company to pay?

The jury determined that the fraud cost the government $175 million. But that figure, thanks to language in the False Claims Act, would ordinarily be tripled when damages are calculated. In addition, as much as $200 million in additional fines, and attorneys’ fees, could be added as well. That latter total could come down to how many technical violations of the False Claim Act were contained in each of the many invoices the company sent over the years.

Trinity Industries had 2013 revenues of $4.4 billion and is best known for making rail cars. Its highway product subsidiary makes guardrails that are in use across the country. Several states have suspended use of the guardrails, due to Harman’s suit. Following a demand for more testing, the company suspended sales of the units pending test results.

In this Oct. 21, 2014 photo, people pass an AT&T store in New York's Times Square. AT&T is being sued by the government over allegations it misled millions of smartphone customers who were promised unlimited data but had their Internet speeds cut by the company — slowing their ability to open web pages or watch streaming video. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

WASHINGTON–Back in June, 2010, AT&T, Inc. disappointed many customers by ending its unlimited data plans for mobile phone customers. The silver lining? If you were an existing customer, you could keep your unlimited data plans.

But according to a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission Tuesday, by October of the following year, AT&T had begun slowing down the data-transfer speeds for customers on the unlimited plans. The so-called throttling, according to the lawsuit, was substantial and in some cities was triggered anytime a customer used as little as 2GB of data in a given month.

The suit names AT&T Mobility, which is the wireless phone subsidiary of Dallas-based AT&T, Inc. In a statement Tuesday afternoon, the company called the suit “baseless.”

“The FTC’s allegations are baseless and have nothing to do with the substance of our network management program,” the statement reads. “It’s baffling as to why the FTC would choose to take this action against a company that, like all major wireless providers, manages its network resources to provide the best possible service to all customers, and does it in a way that is fully transparent and consistent with the law and our contracts.

“We have been completely transparent with customers since the very beginning. We informed all unlimited data-plan customers via bill notices and a national press release that resulted in nearly 2,000 news stories, well before the program was implemented. In addition, this program has affected only about 3% of our customers, and before any customer is affected, they are also notified by text message.”

The FTC says AT&T could have required all existing customers to switch to “tiered” data plans when it stopped offering the unlimited plans to new customers, but that it didn’t because it was afraid it would lose too many accounts. It also says that AT&T could have required customers who re-upped their contracts to switch to tiered plans then, but decided not to for the same reason.

Individual consumption of data over the wireless connections has spiked as smart phones have been more ubiquitous and the number apps and other usage has made a phone more like a mini laptop. Verizon Wireless considered, then discarded, plans to begin throttling its customers’ use of data as recently as Oct. 1.

WHen AT&T began throttling the use of data by customers who exceeded monthly thresholds, it initially capped users at speeds of just 128Kb per second, a standard that was relaxed in 2012 to cap speeds at between 256 Kbps and 512 Kbps. Typically, according to the suit, AT&T mobile customers could expect speeds that ranged from 700 Kbps to 1.7Mbps for older phones and anywhere from 2 to 12 Mpps for faster, newer devices.

That means, the suit alleges, that customers who have paid for unlimited data plans can see their speeds drop 90 to 95 percent once they’ve used enough data to trigger the throttling. On average, it affected users during the last 12 days of their billing cycle.

CNET reported Tuesday that AT&T has “far fewer” phone customers with unlimited plans that it used to, but said it was not clear how many. The FTC says some 25 million customers have had their speeds “throttled” at one time or another.

Tuesday’s action brought praise from some consumer advocacy groups.

“Consumers have been complaining about throttling for years,” said Delara Derakhshani, policy counsel for Consumers Union, the advocacy arm of Consumer Reports. “We’re glad the feds are going after companies that are ripping people off. As the FTC said, unlimited means unlimited. If you charge someone for an unlimited data plan and then slow down their speeds, that sounds deceptive to us. The government says some people saw their data speeds slowed down so dramatically they couldn’t use their smartphones for basic things like web browsing.”

On Oct. 8, AT&T, Inc. agreed to pay $105 million to settle claims by both the FTC and the Federal Communication Commission that it had purposely added monthly charges to its customers’ phone bills for third-party services that hadn’t ordered.

Last week, AT&T announced third-quarter earnings of $3 billion on $33 billion in revenue. Earnings per share were slightly down from a year ago, but the company announced it had added 2 million new wireless customers.