The Waco Court of Appeals has affirmed a Navarro County district court order dismissing claims against State Farm as without a basis in law and fact under Rule 91a, TRCP.
Scarlett Robbins v. State Farm Life Insurance Company (No. 10-24-00047-CV; April 17, 2025) arose from a dispute over ownership of life insurance policies issued by State Farm. The insurer issued the policies to LeJeune, who signed them over to Plaintiff in 2009. In 2016, to settle a lawsuit brought by LeJeune, Plaintiff and LeJeune entered into a contract providing that LeJeune would pay Plaintiff $75,000 for one of the policies, leaving the other in Plaintiff’s hands. LeJeune, however, appealed the judgment on the settlement agreement on the basis that the agreement was incomplete and contested. The court of appeals agreed and remanded to the trial court. It sat a while before Plaintiff sued LeJeune for breach of contract. LeJeune died in 2022, while the case was pending. The death benefits on LeJeune’s two policies totaled about $810,000. LeJeune’s estate representative sent notice to State Farm requesting that it not pay claims under the policies. Shortly thereafter, Plaintiff submitted a claim for the proceeds of both of them. State Farm filed a federal interpleader action to sort things out. Plaintiff responded by adding State Farm to her pending lawsuit against LeJeune, alleging breach of contract, Prompt Pay Act violations, and declaratory judgment.
State Farm filed a Rule 91a motion to dismiss on the basis that Plaintiff’s pleading admitted facts that bar recovery and that the interpleader action was a defense to her claims. The trial court granted the motion and signed an order severing Plaintiff’s claims against State Farm from those against LeJeune. Plaintiff appealed.
In an opinion by Justice Smith, the court of appeals affirmed. Plaintiff argued that the trial court erred in granting the Rule 91a motion because her claims had a basis in law and fact. Her breach of contract claim against State Farm, she contended, arose from the policy and State Farm breached it when they didn’t pay her claims. She further argued that she was entitled to a declaratory judgment determining her entitlement to the policy proceeds. She did, however, admit that State Farm received the letter from LeJeune’s representative and filed an interpleader action to sort things out. State Farm asserted that this admission doomed her case because filing the interpleader action and unconditionally tendering the disputed funds constituted an affirmative defense. As the court observed, “Rule 91a permits motions to dismiss based on affirmative defenses if the allegation in the plaintiff’s petition, taken as true, together with inferences reasonably drawn from them, do not entitle the claimant to the relief sought” (citations omitted). Taking Plaintiff’s admissions about the letter and the interpleader action as true, the trial court “determined that Plaintiff was not entitled to the relief sought because the federal interpleader barred her claims.”
Plaintiff argued that State Farm was not an “innocent stakeholder” and could thus not avail itself of an interpleader action. The trial court, however “was not required to take as true her legal conclusion” (citation omitted). In the event, the federal court determined that State Farm met the requirements for an interpleader action and granted State Farm’s request to deposit the interpleaded funds from the policies into the registry of the court. The trial court did not err in granting State Farm’s motion to dismiss. The court of appeals further rejected Plaintiff’s assertion that she did not receive the required 14-days’ notice of the hearing on State Farm’s motion. The record showed that her counsel received the motion 23 days before the hearing, read the motion the same day, filed a response, appeared at the hearing, and made a lengthy argument opposing the motion. Based on the record, therefore, Plaintiff failed to demonstrate harmful error. Finally, the court rejected Plaintiff’s claim that the trial court improperly severed her claims against State Farm on the basis that her claims against the insurer were “not so interwoven with her remaining claims against [LeJeune] as to make severance proper.”
