Zurich won an insurance coverage dispute with Maxim Crane. On appeal, in addition to defending the merits, Zurich argued that the matter should be dismissed entirely because Maxim lacked standing. This argument led to the question whether a cross-appeal was needed to make that point, and the Fifth Circuit concluded:

… although our judgment would be different if we credited Zurich’s standing argument, that does not mean that Zurich needed to file a cross-appeal to present that argument. To be sure, as a matter of standard appellate practice, “[m]any cases state the general rule that a cross-appeal is required to support modification of the judgment,” whereas “arguments that support the judgment as entered can be made without a cross-appeal.” (quoting [Wright & Miller]). But this case falls within an exception to that general rule. A cross-appeal “is not necessary to challenge the subject-matter jurisdiction of the district court, under the well-established rule that both district court and appellate courts are obliged to raise such questions on their own initiative.” Id.

Maxim Crane Works LP v. Zurich Am. Ins. Co., No. 19-20489 (Aug. 20, 2021) (ultimately, certifying the underlying coverage issue to the Texas Supreme Court).

The practical problems cause by conversion of a Rule 12 motion to one for summary judgment were examined in Lexon Ins. Co. v. FDIC, where the nonmovant argued that “had it received [proper] notice, it would have submitted different evidence of the value of its ‘lost collateral,'” but the Fifth Circuit rejected that argument because the nonmovant “never pleaded nor argued in the district court that its damages could be anything less than the full value of the letters of credit ….” No. 20-30173 (Aug. 2, 2021).

The Texas Supreme Court’s longtime staff attorney for public information, Osler McCarthy, retires on August 31 after many years of dedicated service. I wanted to salute his hard work and share a well-written tribute to him recently prepared by former Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson.

The Fifth Circuit found that Petrobras did not have sufficient knowledge of a potential claim to trigger limitations in Petrobras America, Inc. v. Samsung Heavy Indus. Co., holding:

• two officers “acted in their own interests by accepting $10 million in bribes . . . [t]hus, [they] are clearly adverse agents of Petrobras. Their knowledge cannot be imputed to Petrobras.”;
• “an ujnfavorable contract alone is not a legally cognizable injury”;
• statements in SEC filings about the general topic of bribery, when they involved “separate bribery schemes [that] involved separate parties, separate contracts, and separate ships,” “at best raise fact questions not suitable for disposition under Rule 12(b)(6).”

No. 20-20339 (Aug. 11, 2021).

The Fifth Circuit reversed the Rule 12 dismissal of a Lanham Act case in which “Plaintiffs allege that Defendants purchased trademark terms as keywords for search-engine advertising, then placed generic advertisements that confused customers as to whether the advertisements belonged to or were affiliated with the Plaintiffs.” Adler v. McNeil Consultants, No. 20-10936 (Aug. 10, 2021) (LPHS represented the appellee in this matter).

Season Two of the “Coale Mind” podcast begins by returning to an earlier episode about the Supreme Court’s review of high-profile Fifth Circuit cases — “Is the Fifth Circuit More Conservative than the Roberts Court: Revisited.” I hope you have a chance to listen!

A triable fact issue on the issue of pretext arose in Lindsey v. Bio-Medical Applications: “As anyone who has ever worked in an office environment can attest, there are real deadlines and hortatory ones—and everyone understands the difference between the two. Missing real deadlines results in actual adverse consequences for employer and employee alike—while failing to meet hortatory deadlines does not. BMA does not point to any adverse impact that Lindsey’s tardy reports had on the company. And in any event, there is no evidence BMA ever warned Lindsey that failure to submit the reports on time could jeopardize her job. So there is a genuine issue of material fact as to whether BMA’s assertion that it fired Lindsey for this reason is ‘unworthy of credence.'” No. 20-30289 (Aug. 16, 2021).

The provocatively named book “Hooker to Looker: a makeup guide for the not so easily offended” (video summary available here) gave rise to a dispute about the preemptive force of the Copyright Act, which the Fifth Circuit resolved in favor of preemption by looking to:

• Factual allegations. “Although Di Angelo muddles its complaint with contract allegations aplenty, it also alleges that it ‘acquired copyrights in the [B]ook’ by ‘writing, editing, planning and taking all photographs and making all illustrations, and planning, designing, and arranging the layout of the [B]ook.’ …  Although the complaint uses neither the term   joint work” nor “co-author,” it is nigh impossible to read Di Angelo’s allegations … without concluding that Di Angelo is alleging, at minimum, co-authorship of the Book.” 
• The parties’ contract. “The Contract does not define author, and the word’s common meaning can apply to multiple parties who collaboratively engage in producing one creative work, a possibility expressly contemplated by copyright law. And contrary to Kelley’s suggestion, the terms of the Contract lend some support to the notion that the Book would be produced collaboratively.” (footnote omitted).
• Requested relief. “[A] declaration of Di Angelo’s copyright in the updated work could permit it to exercise rights with respect to that work that it would not enjoy under the Contract. For instance, a declaration could allow Di Angelo to profit from the Book’s update, which according to its state court complaint, Kelley currently
  prevents it from doing.”

Di Angelo Publications, Inc., No. 20-20523 (Aug. 12, 2021).

Under Texas insurance law: “Payment and acceptance of an appraisal award means there is nothing left for a breach of contract claim seeking those same damages. But a plaintiff may still have a claim under the prompt payment law after it accepts an appraisal award. The Supreme Court of Texas recently held that even a preappraisal payment that seemed reasonable at the time does not bar a prompt-payment claim if it does not ‘roughly correspond’ to the amount ultimately owed.” Randel v. Travelers Lloyds, No. 20-20567 (Aug. 12, 2021).

The plaintiffs in Turner v. Cincinnati Ins. Co. obtained a “non-adversarial” default judgment against a defunct vocational school. The Fifth Circuit found that Texas’s “no-direct action” rule did not bar their claim against the school’s insurer: “[T]he Plaintiffs’ default judgment against ATI is an adjudication that satisfies the no-action clause. Accordingly, although the non-adversarial default judgment does not bind Cincinnati to its terms,  the no-direct-action rule is not a bar to this coverage suit.” (citation omitted). (Unfortunately for the plaintiffs, the Court then affirmed the dismissal of their claim on timeliness grounds.) No. 20-50548 (Aug. 13, 2021).

The Fifth Circuit affirmed a jurisdiction-based collateral attack on a judgment in Bessie Jeanne Worthy Revocable Trust, reasoning that in the prior litigation, “the Estate’s Texas citizenship defeated diversity among the parties,” creating a “‘total want of jurisdiction’ to enter judgment[.]” No. 20-10492 (Aug. 10, 2021). In so doing, the Court distinguished Picco v. Global Marine Drilling Co., 900 F.2d 846 (5th Cir. 1990), as turning on a distinct question about the effect of the automatic bankruptcy stay. The able Rory Ryan from Baylor’s law school cautions against an overly broad reading of this new opinion.

To illustrate a point about the risks of unbounded judicial discretion, the Fifth Circuit quoted a well-known gorilla joke in Rollins v. Home Depot USA, No. 20-50736 (Aug. 9, 2021):

Counsel failed to file a summary-judgment response because his notification of filing went to his email “spam” folder. The Fifth Circuit affirmed the denial of relief under Fed. R. Civ. P. 59(e):

“It is not ‘manifest error to deny relief when failure to file was within [Rollins’s] counsel’s ‘reasonable control.’  Notice of Home Depot’s motion for summary judgment was sent to the email address that Rollins’s counsel provided. Rule 5(b)(2)(E) provides for service ‘by filing [the pleading] with the court’s electronic-filing system’ and explains that ‘service is complete upon filing or sending.’ That rule was satisfied here. Rollins’s counsel was plainly in the best position to ensure that his own email was working properly—certainly more so than either the district court or Home Depot. Moreover, Rollins’s counsel could have checked the docket after the agreed deadline for dispositive motions had already passed.”

Rollins v. Home Depot USA, No. 20-50736 (Aug. 9, 2021).

“‘Lost debt’ cases present a unique type of claim. They allege ‘a RICO violation whose central purpose [i]s to prevent the collection of a claim or judgment.’ The substantive RICO violation is the act of preventing collection. And the plaintiff’s injury is the inability to collect the lawful debt. So, when the plaintiff successfully recovers that debt, it is no longer lost. And because that unrecovered debt is the only source of the plaintiff’s injury, there is no RICO claim in its absence.  As a result, a plaintiff cannot rely on its lost debt to animate a RICO suit after it has recovered that debt. The ‘debt is “lost” and thereby
becomes a basis for RICO trebling only if the debt (1) cannot be collected (2)
“by reason of” a RICO violation.’ ‘In other words, to the extent of a successful collection, the RICO claim is abated pro tanto, prior to any application of trebling.'” HCB Fin. Corp. v. McPherson, No. 20-50718 (Aug. 4, 2021) (citations omitted). Put another way: “There must be independent damages to treble; the possibility of treble damages alone cannot confer statutory RICO standing.” 

A recent antitrust case reminds of an important but infrequently-litigated point about the review of pleadings in the context of a motion to dismiss: “If an attached exhibit contradicts a factual allegation in the complaint, ‘then indeed the exhibit and not the allegation controls.'” Quadvest LP v. San Jacinto River Auth., No. 20-20447 (Aug. 3, 2021).

The plaintiffs in Quadvest LP v. San Jacinto River Auth. alleged that a state-created river authority violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act by unreasonably restraining the market for wholesale raw water in Montgomery County. Procedurally, the Fifth Circuit concluded that the denial of the authority’s motion to dismiss on immunity grounds was appealable under Circuit precedent (acknowledging that the Fifth Circuit is an outlier on this point). Substantively, the Court affirmed the denial of the authority’s motion “at this stage” of the case, concluding that “the Texas Legislature did not authorize [the authority’s] entry into and enforcement of the challenged [contract] provisions with the intent to displace competition in the market for wholesale raw water in Montgomery County.” No. 20-20447 (August 5, 2021).

Two rulings about the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege were recently reversed, by both the Fifth Circuit and Dallas’s Fifth District, in response to mandamus petitions. (This is a cross-post with 600commerce.com.)

• In the Fifth Circuit: “[A]s Boeing argues, the district court clearly erred in finding that Plaintiffs established a prima facie case that the contested documents were subject to the crime-fraud exception. The district court concluded that the contested documents were reasonably connected to the fraud based on one finding only—that the documents sought ‘f[e]ll within the period Boeing admit to hav[ing] knowingly and intentionally committed “fraud” in the DPA. However, a temporal nexus between the contested documents and the fraudulent activity alone is insufficient to satisfy the second element for a prima facie showing that the crime-fraud exception applies.” In re The Boeing Co., No. 21-40190 (July 29, 2021, unpublished).
• In the Fifth District, the Court noted: “[A] determination at the TCPA stage as to a prima facie showing does not automatically translate to a prima facie showing for purposes of application of the crime–fraud exception to the attorney–client privilege. The exception UDF attempts to invoke is for crime–fraud, not crime–tort.” From there, it declined to follow a broad view of the exception defined by another Texas intermediate court, “and note that, notwithstanding certain language in the [relevant] opinion, the El Paso court continues to apply the elements of common-law fraud when determining the applicability of the crime fraud exception, rather than requiring proof of a false statement only.” In re Bass, No. 05-21-00102-CV (July 30, 2021) (mem. op.).

A long-running discovery dispute in Texas state court led to a contempt order, which in turn led to a federal-court habeas action. The Fifth Circuit noted that habeas relief was potentially available under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, as codified in 28 U.S.C. § 2254, under which:

… if an adequate state ‘corrective process’ for raising a claim exists that the petitioner could avail him or herself of, a federal court may only consider the claim if the petitioner has exhausted available state remedies. And when the petitioner has done so and the state court has rejected the claim on the merits, federal courts may provide relief only when the state court adjudication was either ‘contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States,’ or ‘based on an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented in the State court proceeding.’

(citations omitted). Among other observations, the Court held: “A rule that due process does not permit the use of civil contempt to compel the production of documents that are in the hands of third parties would also overturn longstanding precedents and would likely be unworkable in practice.” Topletz v. Skinner, No. 20-40136 (July 30, 2021).

• “While litigants should, when possible, identify specific contractual provisions alleged to have been breached, Rule 8 does not require that level of granularity. ‘So long as a pleading alleges facts upon which relief can be granted, it states a claim even if it “fails to categorize correctly the legal theory giving rise to the claim.”‘ ” (citations omitted).
• That said — “That the pleading was sufficient in this contract dispute, governed by an agreement neither exceedingly long nor rife with addenda, exhibits, and multiple parts, does not mean that Rule 8 would necessarily be satisfied by general allegations involving more complex contracts.” 

Sanchez Oil & Gas Corp. v. Crescent Drilling & Prod., Inc., No. 20-20304 (July 30, 2021).