Our longtime friends at the Austin defense firm Chamberlain McHaney brought this notable recent opinion from the Austin Court of Appeals to our notice.
The underlying action in In re Amazon Services, LLC (No. 03-23-00634-CV; filed December 20, 2023) arose from an accident between plaintiff’s vehicle and a delivery truck owned by entity named Last Mile. Plaintiff sued the driver and Last Mile on September 15, 2020. Plaintiff, however, waited until February 2023 to file an amended pleading adding Amazon as a defendant, on the basis that Amazon contracted with Last Mile for delivery services. Plaintiff asserted negligence and vicarious liability against Amazon. Amazon answered and asserted limitations. It subsequently filed a Rule 91a motion to dismiss. At the hearing on the Rule 91a motion, plaintiff argued that Amazon fraudulently concealed its relationship with Last Mile through the actions of Last Mile, the driver, and Last Mile’s attorney, who by the date of the hearing also represented Amazon (a different attorney filed Amazon’s answer, however). Amazon countered that plaintiff offered no evidence that Amazon concealed anything, and that any claim of fraudulent inducement involved the acts of others. The trial court denied Amazon’s Rule 91a motion. Plaintiff subsequently amended its pleadings to add a fraudulent inducement claim against Amazon, again based on the acts of the other parties and their attorney. Amazon filed a petition for writ of mandamus.
In an opinion by Justice Theofanis, the court of appeals conditionally granted the petition. Neither party disputed that plaintiff filed suit against Amazon outside the limitations period, so the issue before the court was whether the trial court clearly abused its discretion by denying Amazon’s Rule 91a motion on the strength of plaintiff’s fraudulent concealment allegations. The problem with this argument, the court determined, was that plaintiff failed to show that Amazon itself engaged in any of the elements of a fraudulent concealment claim. Furthermore, Amazon had no legal duty to disclose its contractual relationship with Last Mile, since they weren’t even sued until well after the limitations period had passed. The fact that the driver, Last Mile, and Amazon used the same attorney for the Rule 91a motion was beside the point, the court observed, since Amazon used a different attorney to file its answer in any event.
The court further rejected plaintiff’s “unclean hands” theory, which may apply to defeat mandamus relief when “one[‘s] conduct in connection with the same matter or transaction has violated the principles of equity and righteous dealing” (citations omitted). Again, the court held, the “unclean hands” doctrine does not apply because “the record here does not support that the complained-of conduct by the attorney, which occurred before he was representing Amazon, is attributable to Amazon such that it should be precluded from its requested mandamus relief.” Finally, the court held that Amazon had no adequate remedy on appeal “because Amazon should not be required to spend time and money defending against claims that are precluded as a matter of law” (citations omitted).
One wishes that the trial court had not made this appeal necessary, but the court of appeals’ opinion should send a salutary message to trial courts to take Rule 91a motions seriously and make sure they do not keep parties in cases where they do not belong. This is exactly the kind of case Rule 91a was designed to kick out, and we are very pleased to see the court of appeals do just that.
