Court Opinion

ID: 9767633
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 05:22:54.684563+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:30:32.112611
License: Public Domain

ON MOTIONS FOR REHEARING
Verne S. Joiner and Charlotte R. Joiner have each filed a motion for rehearing. In his motion, Verne reiterated contentions we considered and addressed in our original opinion to the degree necessary for the disposition of the appeal. His motion for rehearing is overruled.
In her motion for rehearing, Charlotte first proposes to waive her cross-point, the predicate for the partial reversal and remand ordered on original submission, on condition that we affirm the division of the estate of the parties made by the district court. Prior to her motion, Charlotte had presented her cross-point unconditionally, urging that we set aside the community characterization finding on the employee’s profit sharing stock plan. It is only after we have done so that she, disappointed in our determination of a community interest in the plan different from the interest she urges, proposes the conditional waiver in her motion for rehearing. The proposal comes too late for consideration. Lone Star Gas Company v. Sheaner, 157 Tex. 508, 305 S.W.2d 150, 153 (1957).
Alternatively and with the first of two points of error, Charlotte, still insisting that the community interest in the employee’s profit sharing stock plan is 13/14ths, or 93% community, charges us with error in failing to agree with her by our reliance “on a 20% per year ‘vesting’ for five years which is both factually and legally inaccurate.” The factual and legal inaccuracy occurred, Charlotte submits, because the plan, as opposed to a summary of it, contains no “vesting” provision; instead, she represents, the plan provides that an employee who ceases to be a participant for less than five years for any reason other than death, retirement, or disability, is subject to a “forfeiture” of a part of the balance of the participant’s account.
However, the part of the plan to which Charlotte refers for her “forfeiture” representation — section 8.02 of article VIII entitled “Benefits for Participants” — is denominated, in section 8.08, as “the vesting schedule,” the schedule of vesting we observed in our original opinion. Moreover, if there were any doubt about the construction of the plan in this regard, the fact that the parties to the plan, Anderson, Clayton & Co. and Verne S. Joiner, interpreted the plan to provide for the vesting schedule set forth in our original opinion constitutes the highest, if not controlling, evidence that the plan contains the vesting provision. Lone Star Gas Co. v. X-Ray Gas Co., 139 Tex. 546, 164 S.W.2d 504, 508 (1942).
Consequently, we are not persuaded that we originally made a faulty analysis of the plan. Charlotte’s first point of error in overruled.
With her second point, Charlotte assigns error to our taxing costs of appeal against her, arguing that as the party prevailing both in the trial court and on appeal by virtue of her cross-appeal, she is not *500subject to the payment of costs. In making his response to Charlotte’s rehearing motion, Verne did not reply to the point.
Upon reconsideration, we determine that costs of appeal should be shared equally by the parties. As a result of the appeals, Verne secured relief from the division of the parties’ estate and the payment of attorney’s fees ordered by the trial, court, but he was otherwise unsuccessful in his attack on the judgment; Charlotte failed to secure an affirmance of the trial court’s judgment, but she successfully challenged the court’s separate-community characterization of Verne’s employee’s profit sharing stock plan account. Since each party sought review of the trial court’s judgment and secured some relief, but failed to secure the complete relief sought, the costs of appeal are taxed equally against the parties. Tex. R.App.P. 89; Damron v. C.R. Anthony Co., 586 S.W.2d 907, 915 (Tex.Civ.App.— Amarillo 1979, no writ); Wichita Nat. Bank v. United States F. & Guaranty Co., 147 S.W.2d 295, 298 (Tex.Civ.App.—Fort Worth 1941, no writ).
Accordingly, Charlotte’s motion for rehearing is sustained to the extent that costs of appeal are retaxed equally against the parties. Our former judgment of reversal and remand is set aside, and the same judgment of reversal and remand, but with costs of appeal taxed equally against the parties, is here rendered. In all other respects, Charlotte’s motion for rehearing is overruled.