Court Opinion

ID: 9648900
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 14:37:41.528027+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:06.274149
License: Public Domain

OPINION ON MOTION FOR REHEARING
RICHARD H. EDELMAN, Justice.
Appellants’ motion for rehearing is overruled, and the following opinion is submitted to clarify the portion of the preceding majority opinion (the “opinion”) addressing appellants’ fourth point of error. That point argued that the summary judgment evidence raised a fact issue as to whether Ivy and Stephenson had an attorney-client relationship with Scherr based on executed contracts of representation.
As noted in the opinion, appellants’ live pleading, the third amended plea in intervention, contains as its only basis for imposing a tort duty on Scherr the implied, non-contractual relationship allegedly created by appellees’ actions in filing the class action on behalf of all potential class members. Because the plea does not allege a contractual relationship between any of the appellants and appellees, it does not support the existence of a tort duty based on a contractual attorney-client relationship. Therefore, Scherr had no burden as the summary judgment movant to negate the existence of *134such a contractual relationship, and appellants’ evidence could not raise a fact issue on that unpled theory of recovery.
Nor could the existence of a contractual relationship giving rise to a tort duty have been tried by consent based on appellants’ replies to appellees’ motions for summary judgment and their accompanying affidavits because that relationship was mentioned in each reply only in passing as an item of background information and not as a basis upon which liability was being asserted. Like the plea in intervention, each reply claimed liability based only on the implied, non-eontractual relationship allegedly existing between all of the appellants and appellees.
O’NEILL, J., not participating.