Opinion ID: 1635386
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: SmithKline Beecham

Text: To prevail on his negligence claim, Solomon must show that (1) Mission owed him a duty, (2) Mission breached its duty, (3) Mission's breach proximately caused his injuries, and (4) damages resulted from this breach. See Thapar v. Zezulka, 994 S.W.2d 635, 637 (Tex.1999). Because duty is the threshold issue, we begin by addressing whether an employer owes a duty to an at-will employee to use reasonable care when collecting an employee's urine sample for drug testing pursuant to DOT regulations. The existence of a duty is a question of law. SmithKline Beecham Corp., 903 S.W.2d at 351. When considering whether there is a basis for imposing a duty, we consider various factors, including the risk, foreseeability, and likelihood of injury weighed against the social utility of the actor's conduct, the magnitude of the burden of guarding against the injury, and the consequences of placing the burden on the defendant. Phillips, 801 S.W.2d at 525. With these factors in mind, we consider whether Solomon has presented a basis for imposing a common-law duty of reasonable care on employers when conducting in-house urine specimen collection pursuant to DOT regulations. In SmithKline Beecham Corp. v. Doe , this Court addressed the related question of whether an independent drug testing laboratory, hired by an employer to test prospective employees, owes a duty to warn those employees that certain substances, if ingested prior to a drug test, could cause a positive test result. 903 S.W.2d at 351. Emphasizing that we were deciding only the narrow question presented, we concluded that the testing laboratory owed no duty to warn the person tested or to investigate the reason for a positive result. Id. at 354. We declined to address any duty the employer may owe to an employee and expressly reserved the question whether a laboratory may be liable for performing drug tests negligently. Id. at 351. Cf. Willis v. Roche Biomedical Labs., Inc., 61 F.3d 313, 315-16 (5th Cir.1995) (predicting that Texas courts would hold, based on SmithKline, that drug testing laboratories owe no duty of care to their clients' employees).