4 days ago
Texas bill, a trucking priority for tort reform, dies in House committee
Legislation that passed the Texas Senate last month and that the trucking industry believed would bring about 'much-needed reforms' in trucking-related lawsuits has died in the House.
But another piece of legislation backed by the industry, SB30, and its companion bill, HB 4806, are still considered alive as the Texas state legislative session races toward its Monday conclusion.
The companion House bill to SB39, approved in April, was HB 4688. It was referred to the Committee for Judiciary & Civil Jurisprudence. While the House of Representatives' docket for the legislation shows several steps at the committee, including public hearings, there is no vote on the list of no action taken on the bill in recent days, barring a miraculous turn of events, the bill is considered dead in the Texas Legislature, which meets every two years.
When the bill passed in the Senate, it was hailed by the Texas Trucking Association. In a prepared statement released at the time, TTA President John Esparaza said the legislation 'marks a significant step forward in protecting the integrity of our legal system and Texas trucking industry.'
'This bill introduces much-needed reforms to how commercial motor vehicle collision cases are handled in Texas courts,' he said at the time. 'These reforms will establish fair, consistent, and statewide standards, helping to ensure that justice is applied equally across the state.'
But in a statement released to FreightWaves Thursday, Esparaza conceded defeat for this session.'SB 39 was an important piece of our tort reform package …,' he said in the statement. 'As a priority…we are disappointed that SB 39 died in the House Judiciary & Civil Jurisprudence Committee and will not become law this session.'
In a commentary about what SB39 and its companion House bill would have accomplished, attorneys for the law firm of Lewis Brisbois touched on several key points.
One change would have minimized questions about the background of the driver, according to the law firm. 'Where defendant trucking companies have already stipulated to their drivers being in the course and scope of employment, plaintiffs' attorneys can no longer inflame juries with arguments about the trucking companies' actions when they have no causal/legal relationship with the harms alleged,' Lewis Brisbois said. 'In other words, if a case goes on to trial, then the jury should solely be focused on the actions of the drivers involved in the incident.'
SB39 also was the vehicle that the TTA spoke of last year in trying to complete the unfinished work of HB 19, passed in 2021 but generally seen as not providing the relief in litigation that trucking attorneys had expected.
In an interview last year with FreightWaves, Lee Parsley, general counsel for Texans for Lawsuit Reform (TLS), said one of the goals of HB 19 was to give new emphasis to the 'admission rule.'
Last year, Parsley said of that rule: 'It basically says that if I, as the employer, agree to accept responsibility for my employees' actions that may have caused the injury, it is supposed to simplify the trial. You don't need to go down the rabbit hole of figuring out things like negligent hiring and negligent training. It's supposed to simplify it so that in the trial, you're just focused on who actually caused the accident and what the damages are at that point.'
The Lewis Brisbois commentary said SB39 would have 'recognized the admissions rule by eliminating key exceptions.' Quoting a precedent involving Werner Enterprises (NASDAQ: WERN), the attorneys said the admission rule clarifies that an 'employer's admission that an employee was acting in the course and scope of their employment when the employee allegedly engaged in negligent conduct bars a party allegedly injured by the employee's negligence from pursuing derivative theories of negligence against the employer.'
That citation quoted by the attorneys is from the case of Blake vs. Werner, the nuclear verdict initially handed down in 2018 and which now awaits a decision by the Texas Supreme Court following oral arguments in December. The original verdict, less than $90 million, has ballooned to more than $100 million with case involves the death and injuries in a family that crossed the median strip in bad winter weather in West Texas and collided with a Werner truck headed the other direction. The jury verdict that the Werner driver should have been going slower in that weather and would therefore not have been in position to slam into the oncoming vehicle has been a particular source of anger within trucking. But the Blake family involved in the crash won at trial and on appeal before it headed to the state's highest court.
The Lewis Brisbois commentary said the critics of SB39 'have voiced concerns that this change will further stifle plaintiffs' abilities to ensure that juries consider all parties and trucking companies' own liability in the harms by alleged company misdeeds.'
There is still hope at the TTA for SB30, which seeks to limit various types of payouts in crashes involving trucks through a variety of steps. Like SB39, SB30 passed the Senate. It is considered to have life as HB 4806 before the end of the legislative session.
'We will continue to pursue tort reform in SB30, however, as we head into the weekend and our final day of session on Monday, June 2,' Esparaza said.
HB 4806, is still listed as being in committee in the House.
In a blog post from the law firm of Varghese Summersett, which among other activities represents plaintiffs suing trucking companies, the firm summed up the key points in the legislation.
It would place caps on economic damages, the firm said. It restricts payouts only to amounts paid by the plaintiffs rather than what was billed by the providers of health care services to the plaintiffs. It makes changes in rules of evidence and also changes various liability standards. A jury must be unanimous in settling on noneconomic standards. There is also a shift in defining interest charges.
In a summary of SB30 published by TLS, the organization said the combined SB30/HB 4806 'guides jurors with fair and consistent rules for awarding noneconomic damages, ensuring they are truly compensatory.'
Among the provisions in the bill, according to TLS, are that the legislation 'gives jurors understandable definitions of pain and suffering and mental anguish and clear instructions that those damages should be based on the plaintiff's injury — not the defendant's conduct that is unrelated to the incident being litigated — and cannot be used to punish a defendant.'
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