Justice Meg Poissant
Justice Randy Wilson
Justice Charles Spain
In our ongoing effort to identify appellate opinions that deal with attorney’s fee awards, a recent Houston [14th] Court of Appeals decision deserves notice for its application of SCOTX precedent requiring claimants seeking to recover attorney’s fees to segregate the fees between claims for which they are recoverable and claims for which they are not.
Brazoria County Imaging Center, LLC; Robert D. Neidert; and Robert S. Neidert v. Celeste Investment Group Angleton, LLC (No. 14-21-00485-CV; filed July 18, 2023) arose from commercial lease dispute. The lessor (Celeste) sued lessees for breach of the lease and asserted tort claims for fraud, fraudulent transfer, and liability under the Texas Theft Liability Act. After a bench trial, the trial court found for plaintiff on its breach and Theft Act claims. The court awarded $17,200 in damages, prejudgment interest, and $18,195 in reasonable and necessary attorney’s fees, court costs, and postjudgment interest. The judgment did not specify the basis of the damages of award, however, and the court did not issue findings of fact or conclusions of law. The lessees appealed.
In an opinion by Justice Wilson, the court of appeals affirmed the judgment as to liability but reversed and remanded the attorney’s fee issue. Citing Tony Gullo Motors I, L.P. v. Chapa, 212 S.W.3d 299, 313-14 (Tex. 2006), which held that “only when discrete legal services advance both a recoverable and unrecoverable claim that they are so intertwined that they need not be segregated,” the court concluded that the lessor’s attorney had failed to establish, beyond a conclusory statement, that segregation was not required. Specifically, the attorney “conceded that [lessor] did not segregate its attorney’s fees for its fraud claims, even though attorney’s fees are not recoverable for those claims.” Further, “[n]either of [lessor’s] expert witnesses on attorney’s fees testified that all or part of the legal services of [lessor’s] attorneys advanced both a recoverable and unrecoverable claim.” Based on this record, the court determined that the trial court erred and remanded the attorney’s fee issue to the trial court for new trial.
While this case doesn’t do anything other than apply SCOTX precedent in the appropriate way, we nevertheless believe that it is important to shed light on the good work of our intermediate appellate justices across the state. In the legislative politics bubble, it has unfortunately become fashionable to assume that just because a judge does not have the “right” partisan affiliation, the judge must necessarily make rulings based on politics and not the law. In this particular case, a Republican justice wrote the opinion, in which two Democratic justices joined. That’s the way it works almost all of the time, no matter what the partisan makeup of our courts happens to be. Is the system perfect? Of course not—no system is. But we need to stop talking about courts and judges as having partisan political agendas. Doing that does great damage to the judicial system and—unjustifably—undermines public confidence in the judiciary. One need look no further than the catastrophic decline in public faith in the impartiality of SCOTUS to see what kind of damage is being done at that level. God forbid we let that happen here.
