The Tyler Court of Appeals has affirmed an Anderson County district court order dismissing a health care liability claim for lack of standing.
Margie Pearl Davis v. Palestine Principal Health Care Limited Partnership, Palestine-Principal G.P., Inc., Oluyemisi Akintunde, M.D., Oluyemisi Akintunde, M.D., P.A. (No. 12-24-00243-CV; April 16, 2025) arose from an unhappy set of circumstances. The mother of a child who required immediate resuscitation after birth sued Palestine Regional Medical Center and its pediatrician on call for negligence, alleging that the child suffered permanent and neurological injuries. About a year after suit was filed, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services opened an investigation of the child’s mother because the child had tested positive for methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana and was removed from his mother’s care. The Department was named the child’s temporary managing conservator by the Anderson County Court at Law and placed in the child in Plaintiff Davis’s care. A year later, the mother filed an amended petition adding Davis, individually and as next friend of the child. Subsequently, the mother’s parental rights were terminated, and her claims were not included in a second amended petition filed thereafter.
Defendants filed a motion to abate and show authority alleging that Plaintiff lacked both standing and capacity and that the Department, as managing conservator, was the proper party to the lawsuit. Plaintiff produced a copy of the court order awarding the Department conservatorship and expressly stating that Plaintiff was permitted to act as the child’s next friend. The trial court granted the motion to abate on the basis that Plaintiff lacked capacity and that the Department was the child’s legal guardian. Plaintiff procured a second court order granting her the right to represent the child in the personal injury suit, including the right to pursue the individual claim of medical expenses up to age 18. Relying on the order, Plaintiff filed a second amended petition in her individual capacity and as the child’s next friend. Defendants filed motions to dismiss, which the trial court granted without prejudice. Plaintiff subsequently adopted the child in July 2024 and filed a motion to vacate the dismissal order, which the trial court denied. Plaintiff appealed.
In an opinion by Justice Hoyle, the court of appeals affirmed. The court considered the capacity and standing issues together, since Plaintiff made the same arguments on both counts. “The general test for standing in Texas,” the court observed, “requires that there (1) shall be a real controversy between the parties, which (2) will be actually determined by the judicial declaration sought” (citations omitted). Capacity, on the other hand, “concerns a party’s personal right to come into court” and “must be challenged by a verifiable pleading, or it is waived” (citations omitted). The issue boiled down to whether the family court order conferred standing and capacity upon Davis in its order stating that she had the right “to pursue any and all claims of [the child] . . . to include: the right to seek the recovery of all damages for [the child], including, but not limited to: [the child’s] medical expenses up to [the child] turning age 18 as well as any and all other medical expenses or personal injury damages.” Davis also pointed to § 153.371, Family Code, which assigns to a person appointed as managing conservator by the Department a right to represent the child in legal action. The problem, the court found, was that the record did “not indicate that Davis was appointed possessory conservator in the Family Court’s termination order.” The statute, consequently, did not grant the family court the authority “to expand Davis’s role.”
Next, Davis argued that her adoption of the child related back to her original filing, curing the standing problem under § 16.068, CPRC. This argument didn’t work because Davis lacked standing to file the original lawsuit, so there was nothing to relate back to. As the court put it, “the relate-back doctrine cannot be used to create jurisdiction where none existed” (citations omitted). Finally, Davis claimed that the legislature could not have intended the unjust result in which the child’s mother “lost standing when her rights were terminated but Davis could not assert the claim until adoption occurred,” thereby allowing limitations to run out on the original claim. Unfortunately, the court determined, both of those events occurred after limitations had already expired. In fact, as the court observed, Davis had possession of the child as early as June 2022 and commenced adoption proceedings, but “she testified that she was ‘still kind of deciding’ whether to adopt [the child] and was ‘taking[her] time’ in April 2023.” Under those circumstances, the court could not “conclude that an unjust result is likely to occur.”
