In a wrongful death suit concerning courts’ personal jurisdiction over non-resident defendants, the Dallas Court of Appeals has reversed a trial court’s order denying Defendants’ special appearance and dismissed the suit for lack of personal jurisdiction.
Electronic Research, Inc. D/B/A ERI and ERI Installations, Inc., Appellants v. Maria Anita Reyna, as Next Friend of J.M.A., A Minor, Appellee (No. 05-24-01097-CV; July 23, 2025) arose from negligence claims stemming from a 2011 construction-site accident that killed Plaintiff’s nephew. The decedent, a Texas resident, was employed by ERI Installations to erect a radio-tower in Indiana. While working on the site, using equipment provided by Electronic Research, a piece of equipment collapsed, causing him to fall over 300 feet to his death. At that time, decedent had not been “tied off and had inadequate fall protection.” Plaintiff’s widow filed a wrongful death suit in Indiana, which settled in 2014. But because the decedent’s son was not biologically related to his widow, the decedent’s aunt sued Defendants in Texas, asserting negligence, negligence per se, and gross negligence. Defendants, both Indiana-based firms, filed a special appearance, which the trial court denied. Defendants sought interlocutory relief.
In an opinion by Justice Garcia, the court of appeals reversed and dismissed Defendants from the case, finding that they lacked the necessary “minimum contacts” to establish personal jurisdiction. We are now familiar with the applicable law. Unless a plaintiff can show general jurisdiction, a Texas court can exercise specific jurisdiction over a nonresident defendant if: (1) the defendant has established minimum contacts with the state, and (2) the exercise of jurisdiction comports with traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice. To satisfy the “minimum contacts” requirement, (1) the defendant must have purposefully availed itself of the laws of the forum state, and (2) the plaintiff’s claim arises from or relates to the defendant’s forum contacts. TV Azteca, S.A.B. de C.V . v. Ruiz, 490 S.W.3d at 37 (Tex. 2016). The second element (plaintiff’s claim arises from the defendant’s forum contacts) requires application of the substantial-connection test, which considers: (1) the principal concern of the claim, (2) whether defendant’s forum contacts will be the focus of the trial, and (3) whether those contacts are related to the operative facts of the claim. See id. at 53.
Defendants argued that Plaintiff failed to establish their minimum contacts with Texas because no “substantial connection” existed between their Texas contacts and the operative facts of Plaintiff’s claims. Plaintiff responded that Defendants purposefully availed themselves of Texas law by: (1) registering to conduct business in Texas in 2005, (2) performing a significant amount of work in Houston and Huntsville, (3) covering transportation and lodging costs for Texas-based employees working at the job site, (4) specifically recruiting and employing Texas residents like the decedent and his supervisor, (5) temporarily dispatching decedent and his team, while they were in Texas, to perform the work that caused the fatal accident, (6) designating decedent’s supervisor as the OSHA“Competent Person” in control of the means and details of the team’s work, (7) providing training, safety materials, and job details to Aliff, his supervisor, and other Texan employees while they were in Texas, and (8) communicating some job and safety details to decedent’s Texas-based supervisor while he was in Texas, which he relied upon when supervising and making the safety decisions that led to decedent’s death.
The court rejected the first four allegations, citing a lack of substantial connection to Plaintiff’s overarching claim, which concerns the accident in Indiana. The court agreed to consider Plaintiff’s remaining allegations about Texas-based training and receipt of safety materials, finding that they were facially relevant to the claim. While the training received in Texas and sending of safety and job-related information to Texas were connected to elements of Plaintiff’s claim, however, they were not central enough to constitute a “substantial connection,” being neither the claim’s principal concern nor the focus of trial. As the court pointed out, the operative facts of Plaintiff’s negligence claims principally concerned the acts, omissions, and conditions at the Indiana site, not the preparatory activities that transpired in Texas. Consequently, these concerns would be the focus of trial and discovery, not the aforementioned activities.
The court based its reasoning on Moki Mac River Expeditions v. Drugg, 221 S.W.3d 569, 575–76 (Tex. 2007), another wrongful death suit against a nonresident corporation. In Moki Mac, SCOTX held that the connection between the defendant’s state contacts and the suit’s operative facts were too weak to suggest that those facts arose from or out of the defendant’s state contacts. And while Defendant cited two cases in which courts exercised specific jurisdiction based on nonresident defendants’ conduct (i.e., recruiting and training in Texas), the court concluded that neither case applied all three of the Moki Mac substantial-connection factors. Thus, decedent and his supervisor’s in-Texas training and instruction had no substantial connection to the operative facts of the accident.
The court rejected Plaintiff’s attempt to impute the Texas contacts of Electronic Research’s third party contractors responsible for training Texas employees to Defendants. Plaintiff further asserted that those Texas contacts should be imputed to Defendants because they supposedly ratified employees’ use of personal protective equipment taken between Texas and Indiana. The court disagreed, stating that “appellants’ requiring employees to supply their own personal protective equipment, even subject to appellants’ approval, does not clearly evidence appellants’ purposeful availment of wherever the equipment happened to be brought from.” Lastly, Plaintiff alleged that Defendants spoliated evidence, but because Plaintiff cited no evidence in support of this contention at trial, the court couldn’t consider it on appeal. The court thus reversed and dismissed the case for want of personal jurisdiction.
TCJL Intern Shaan Rao Singh researched and drafted this article.
