The Houston [1st] Court of Appeals has ordered a Harris County district court to rule on a corporate defendant’s motion to compel arbitration that has been pending for seven months.’
In re OxyVinyls LP (No. 01-23-00708-CV; issued December 28, 2023) arose from an underlying third-party personal injury suit brought by an employee of an independent contractor doing maintenance work at an Oxy facility in Pasadena. In February 2022 the trial court entered a docket control order setting various deadlines for the case: August 2023 for plaintiff’s designation of expert witnesses; September 2023 for Oxy’s designation of experts; October 2023 deadline for completion of discovery and amendments to pleadings; and November 2023 for trial. Oxy answered the suit and written discovery commenced. In October 2022 Oxy requested plaintiff’s employment file from his employer, Turner Industries. In February 2023 Turner produced the file, which included plaintiff’s employment contract. This contract contained an arbitration provision under which plaintiff agreed to arbitrate all claims, including common law tort claims, arising from his employment with the company. The agreement further defined “company” to include the contractor’s customers. Oxy promptly filed a motion to compel arbitration in April 2023.
This is where the trial court went off the rails. Oxy requested a hearing on its motion, but the trial court responded that the first open date for the hearing would not come up until August, four months after the hearing request, and denied Oxy’s request for either an emergency hearing or a hearing prior to the August date. Oxy then put its motion to compel on the court’s June 5, 2023 submission docket. The court subsequently issued to orders requiring Oxy to produce witnesses for depositions within 45 days but did not rule on Oxy’s motion to compel. Oxy tried again on August 16 and September letters to the trial court. Again, no action. Finally, with the trial date looming, Oxy filed a petition for writ of mandamus and a motion for temporary relief and a stay. The court of appeals granted a stay, along with a gentle reminder that the trial court could rule on the motion to compel any time. The trial court eventually held a hearing on the motion in early November but did not rule.
Faced with such dogged refusal to make a ruling on a routine motion, the court of appeals held that the trial court clearly abused its discretion in failing to carry out its ministerial duty to rule on Oxy’s motion to compel arbitration within a reasonable time after Oxy made it. Seven months—five of which Oxy’s motion sat gathering dust on the trial court’s submission docket—was simply too long (citing cases holding that failure to rule on a motion to compel arbitration for six months constituted an abuse of discretion). The court of appeals, following its own precedent, held further that Oxy had no adequate remedy on appeal.
We continue to be baffled by these cases in which trial courts simply refuse to make rulings and are curious whether the trial court in question in this case has demonstrated a pattern of similar conduct. Hopefully, the legislative changes to judicial education and training, together with the granular court-by-court data we will soon get from the Office of Court Administration, will identify where the problems are and how they ought to be addressed.
