Court Opinion

ID: 9690651
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 19:30:08.808271+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:19:00.814624
License: Public Domain

TOM RICKHOFF, Justice,
concurring.
I now agree that the attorney’s fees awarded in this declaratory judgment action were equitable and just when reviewed under an abuse of discretion standard and were reasonable and necessary when reviewed under the factual sufficiency standard. But I also believe, as I did when we attempted an equitable adjustment in our earlier opinion, that the full payment of the fees falls inequitably upon the Herrings. This simple ingress/egress easement dispute was tortured into a nonsensical Dickensian nightmare by the Herrings’ attorney, Earl Cobb.1 All the confusion and most of the resulting needless energy and years of litigation were generated by Mr. Cobb’s bizarre concept that people could build and maintain a road they could not use. It is true that the Herrings hired Mr. Cobb and continued the litigation. But it seems inequitable to require these litigants to pay twice for their lawyer’s mistakes. I believe this case is similar to criminal cases in which the parties, who find the legal issues somewhat beyond their full comprehension, inordinately suffer the consequences of a problem that exists within our institutions and that should.be subject to an institutional solution.2

. “{Herring v. Bocquet]drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, gotten so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least....” Charles Dickens, Bleak House 52 (Penguin classics ed.1971).

. See, e.g., Bone v. State, 12 S.W.3d 521 (Tex.App.— San Antonio 1999, pet. filed); Mitchell v. State, 974 S.W.2d 161 (Tex.App.—San Antonio 1998), vacated, 989 S.W.2d 747 (Tex.Crim.App.1999).