Justice Rebeca Huddle
The Texas Supreme Court has reversed a Dallas Court of Appeals ruling that remanded for new trial a case based on a spoliation instruction that Plaintiff asked for and relied on to avoid having to adequately prove its damages.
Ron Valk d/b/a Platinum Construction v. Copper Creek Distributors, Inc. and Jose Doniceth Escoffie (No. 24-0516; April 17, 2026) arose from a theft of service claim between a construction company and employees who allegedly diverted company personnel to work on the employees’ own residential construction projects. At the center of the controversy was Plaintiff’s allegation that Defendants closed several accounts containing emails and QuickBooks accounting records to conceal them from discovery. Plaintiff asked the trial court to sanction Defendants by including a spoliation instruction in the jury charge. The trial court agreed but didn’t prescribe the substance of the instruction at that point. At trial Plaintiff argued before the jury that because Defendants hid evidence proving the extent of the labor diversion, it couldn’t properly frame its damages issue. Defendants objected to the spoliation charge. The trial court overruled it and gave a spoliation instruction. The jury awarded $150,000 in damages for labor theft, a lot less than the $673,000 Plaintiff sought. Defendants appealed. The Dallas Court of Appeals reversed and remanded for trial on the spoliation issue. Plaintiff sought review, which SCOTX granted.
In an opinion by Justice Huddle, SCOTX reversed and remanded to the court of appeals. The analysis commenced with the general rule that “when multiple grounds for reversal of a trial court’s judgment are presented, courts of appeals should ‘first address issues that would require rendition’ and thus should consider those issues before ordering a remand” (citations omitted). Under rare circumstances, the court of appeals may remand even when rendition is warranted “in cases in which the governing law changed during the life of the case” (citations omitted). In these cases, remand would serve the interest of justice because the intervening developments “likely would have influenced the parties’ motion practice at the summary-judgment stage.”
But there was no such intervening change in law in this case. Instead, the court of appeals “reasoned that it could bypass the rendition points altogether because it identified an error that, in its view, may have prevented the full development and presentation of evidence,” citing its “broad discretion to remand this case for further proceedings…. Had it addressed other rendition challenges before remanding the case, its analysis may have obviated the need for a new trial, either entirely or with respect to some parties or issues.” Although SCOTX has “remanded in the interest of justice in cases where the trial court erroneously precluded a party from presenting a necessary aspect of its case,” a court does not have discretion to remand “merely because hindsight may reveal flaws in a party’s case.” As Justice Huddle stated, “[n]othing in this record suggests that the trial court’s ruling on the spoliation instruction precluded [Plaintiff’s] presentation of evidence or resulted in a record that was not fully developed. As we have frequently observed, remand is not appropriate in this case.”
The Court further noted that: (1) this case had been on file for five years, (2) Plaintiff retained a damages expert but opted not to offer his opinions at trial, (3) Plaintiff declined to depose any of the allegedly diverted workers or subpoena the residential projects’ owners to help determine the number of workers on site, or (4) use bank statements it found in discovery. Instead, Plaintiff “repeatedly told the jury that no other damages evidence was available due to the covert nature of the theft coupled with spoliation.” In short, Plaintiff decided not to do everything it might have done to prove up its damages and wanted “a second bite at the apple.” The Court thus remanded to the court of appeals to broaden its harm analysis in light of the record as a whole.
