In re Energy Transfer LP, Enable Midstream Partners, LP, and Enable GP, LLC (No. 14-23-00479-CV; February 6, 2024) arose from a personal injury action brought by an employee of the relators. At the time of his employment, Plaintiff signed an employment agreement containing an arbitration provision. Relators moved to compel arbitration and requested a hearing, but before the motion could be heard Plaintiff served on relators 175 requests for production. Relators objected and moved for protection. Plaintiff responded by filing a motion to compel. After some back and forth, the trial court set a hearing on the motion, which was reset twice. A week before the hearing date, however, Plaintiff’s objected to relators’ motion to compel and requested the trial court to order the requested discovery and schedule a jury trial on whether Plaintiff was required to arbitrate his claims. A few weeks after hearing Plaintiff’s motion to compel discovery, the trial court granted the motion and denied relators’ motion to compel arbitration. Relators filed an interlocutory appeal.
The court of appeals granted mandamus relief. In a per curiam opinion, the court held that the trial court clearly abused its discretion in multiple respects. First, the trial court simply ignored black letter law rejecting Plaintiff’s argument that relators waived arbitration by seeking a continuance of the arbitration motion to give them time to respond to Plaintiff’s response, which contained new arguments and evidence. Second, the trial court ignored black letter law by permitting pre-arbitration merit-based discovery. Third, the trial court ignored black letter law by failing to refer the dispute to arbitration once the relators had proven the existence of an arbitration agreement.
The trial court’s actions in this case are more than a little disturbing. There is no excuse for what happened here. Relators should never have been put to the time and expense of trying to get the trial court to follow the law, much less to bear the cost of appeal. We have no idea of why it happened or what circumstances led the trial court to incur such a direct and unequivocal rebuke from the court of appeals. But whatever it was, the litigants deserved a lot better than they got.
