The Texas Supreme Court has denied review of an Eastland Court of Appeals decision dismissing a landowner’s appeal for want of jurisdiction on the basis that the lawyer who filed objections to the commissioners’ award and pursued the appeal never represented the landowner who was a party to the condemnation proceeding.
Spoon Ranch Family Limited Partnership and DDMP, LLC v. Atmos Energy Corporation (No. 11-22-00210-CV; pet. denied May 10, 2024) arose from a 2021 condemnation suit initiated by Atmos to acquire an easement and temporary workspace easement across property in Mitchell County. Special commissioners promptly set a Zoom hearing to hear evidence concerning the value of the proposed right-of-way. Spoon Ranch, the landowner, received due notice of the hearing. Between the date special commissioners set the hearing and the hearing date, Spoon Ranch entered into a contract with Potts, an attorney with the Potts Law Firm, and an LLC formed by Potts, DDMP, for the sale of the land. The contract provided that Spoon Ranch transferred its authority to Potts and assigned him any proceeds of the condemnation action. It also authorized Potts to negotiate directly with Atmos. A few days prior to the commissioners hearing, Bins, a lawyer at Potts’s law firm, notified Atmos of the contract but indicated that it the deal had not yet closed. In the event, the special commissioners held the hearing without Spoon Ranch, who did not appear. The commissioners awarded $9,341 to Spoon Ranch for the easement. The award was filed with the trial court, and Atmos paid that amount in to the registry of the trial court. The trial court subsequently signed an order authorizing Atmos to take possession.
Three weeks after the commissioners hearing, Bins electronically filed a general denial and objections and exceptions to the special commissioners’ award, though the objections were not signed and simply contained the typewritten name “Spoon Ranch” without any contact information for the Ranch or a lawyer. A few weeks later, Bins filed a notice of appearance in the case on behalf of DDMP as the assignee of Spoon Ranch but again did not file a notice of appearance on behalf of Spoon Ranch. At the same time Bins filed amended objections to the award on behalf of DDMP (which were the same as the earlier filed unsigned objections). Bins further spoke with Atmos’s counsel and informed him that he represented DDMP, not Spoon Ranch. The following day Atmos filed a special appearance, objecting to the trial court’s exercise of jurisdiction over the case and moving for Bins to show authority to act on behalf of Spoon Ranch under Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 12. Atmos further requested entry of judgment in accordance with the commissioners’ award, as provided by statute. About a week later Spoon Ranch got around to assigning its rights and claims in the litigation to DDMP, which responded to the show authority motion and conceded that Bins, although he filed the unsigned objections, never represented Spoon Ranch. The trial court set a hearing date for the show authority motion and request for entry of judgment and electronically served Bins with notice. But neither Bins nor anyone else showed up on behalf of the landowner at the hearing, which was held without them. The trial court dismissed the unsigned objections and ordered them stricken. It then adopted the special commissioners’ award in accordance with its ministerial duty. Bins filed a motion for new trial, which was overruled by operation of law. Bins appealed.
In an opinion by Justice Trotter, the court of appeals dismissed the case for want of jurisdiction. The question was whether the unsigned objections Bins filed were sufficient to constitute an appeal of the special commissioners’ award and establish the trial court’s jurisdiction over the case. The court held that they were not sufficient because Bins was not a party to the condemnation proceeding. At best, he was acting either on his own or on behalf of Potts and DDMP, who were not parties to the condemnation proceeding. Spoon Ranch and DDMP tried to argue that the trial court did not explicitly grant Atmos’s Rule 12 motion to show authority, in which case the amended objections validated the unsigned ones and constituted a proper appeal. The court of appeals rejected this argument on the basis that the trial court, at the conclusion of the show authority hearing, stated his finding that the attorney for Potts and DDMP failed to show authority to file pleadings on behalf of Spoon Ranch, invalidating the unsigned objections as well as the later effort to amend them. The trial court thus acted properly in entering judgment on the commissioners’ award.
But rather than affirming the trial court’s ruling on the Rule 12 motion, as it normally would, the court dismissed the case for want of jurisdiction. Spoon Ranch and DDMP argued in their amended motion for new trial that their constitutional due process rights were violated when the trial court held a hearing on the Rule 12 motion without them. They claimed that the notice of hearing was sent to Bins’s junk mail folder, preventing him from seeing it. The only problem was that they didn’t raise this argument when they filed a motion for new trial after the hearing in which judgment was entered. Instead, they waited until more than two months after the hearing, far beyond the 30-day deadline for filing an amended or supplemental motion for new trial without leave of court. Anything filed after that date without leave of court “and more than thirty days after the appellate time timetable has commenced is a nullity and cannot be considered by the trial court” (citations omitted). Because the amended motion for new trial was not timely, the trial court could not consider the Ranch’s and DDMP’s motion to set aside the default judgment. Even so, the court added, they wouldn’t have succeeded anyway because they presented no evidence of a meritorious defense or the absence of delay or injury to Atmos, two of the three facts set out in Craddock v. Sunshine Bus Lines, Inc. 133 S.W.2d 124 (Tex. 1939) (the other factor being the failure to answer was due to accident or mistake, not conscious indifference).
In the end, because Spoon Ranch filed no objections to the commissioners’ award, the trial court had the ministerial duty to adopt it and enter judgment, and the judgment was not appealable. Consequently, the court of appeals had no jurisdiction over the appeal.
