Justice John Devine
The Texas Supreme Court has reversed a Corpus Christi Court of Appeals decision affirming a default judgment on the basis that the secretary of state’s Whitney certificate showing that substituted service was returned undeliverable from an address provided by Plaintiff did not establish that such service complied with the statute.
Shamrock Enterprises, LLC d/b/a FRSTeam Gulfcoast/LA v. Top Notch Movers, LLC (No. 24-0581; January 16, 2026) arose from an invoice issued by a moving company addressed to a location in Alabama. When the invoice went unpaid, the moving company sued the customer but provided a different address in Alabama for service of process. At the company’s request, the district clerk issued a citation on the customer via the Secretary of State at the different address, which was verified by a Whitney certificate. The citation came back in the email, and the customer failed to appear. The company filed a motion for default judgment, which the trial court granted, awarding it actual damages, attorney’s fees, and costs. The district clerk mailed the judgment to the same address, but it too was returned as undeliverable. Eventually, the customer got wind of the judgment and filed a restricted appeal seeking to vacate the judgment based on improper service of process. The court of appeals affirmed. The customer sought review.
In an opinion by Justice Devine, SCOTX reversed and remanded. The customer argued that it was not amenable to substituted service because it didn’t do business in Texas, but in any event, the company failed to comply with the statute’s service requirements, due process requires reversal when the Whitney certificate showed return of service, and the record did not demonstrate the nonresident customer’s minimum contacts with Texas. Here the customer did not register with the SOS to transact business in the state because it alleged that it was engaged in interstate commerce. But the court didn’t need to reach the merits of that issue because the record didn’t reflect that substituted service was actually forwarded to the customer’s “most recent address … on filed with the secretary of state.” (This is odd because the company’s trial court filings reflected the address of the customer’s principal office at an address different from the one used for service of process.) Consequently, the company couldn’t show that the address it provided to the SOS was the same one required by the statute. The court of appeals thus erred by presuming that the SOS’s Whitney certificate “conclusively established that [Shamrock] was properly served with process.” And because Top Notch “hitched its wagon to section 5.251(10(A) [BOC], the default judgment can survive only if the record demonstrates strict compliance with that statute.” A Whitney certificate standing alone will not suffice. The court vacated the judgment and returned the case to the trial court.
Chief Justice Blacklock, joined by Justices Lehrmann, Busby, Young, and Sullivan, filed a concurring opinion.The opinion emphasized the “law’s deep skepticism of default judgments” and “the fundamental requirement of due process” that a party receives notice of an action in which it has an interest. Here the moving company sent its invoice to one address in order to get paid, but for purposes of litigation had service of process sent to another address. As the Chief pointed out, when the citation came back, the company made no effort to contact the customer at other addresses which it used to conduct business with the customer in Alabama and Louisiana. In other words, “nothing in this record indicates that Top Notch acted like someone who ‘wanted’ to give Shamrock notice of this lawsuit” (citation omitted). Both federal and state constitutional due process demand more than simply sending a letter and leaving it at that. A party should at least “take further reasonable, low-cost steps to provide actual notice of a lawsuit,” and if it does not it “should never be permitted to obtain a default judgment in a Texas court.
