Court Opinion

ID: 9661319
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 22:35:19.731607+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:52:41.191542
License: Public Domain

GREEN, Justice,
dissenting.1
The majority holds that a non-movant can defeat a summary judgment through the use of conclusory and equivocal affidavits. This departure from well-known principles governing the competency of summary judgment affidavits is unexplained, so I must respectfully dissent.

Facts

This is a straightforward case. Nagel demanded payment of amounts owing on a real estate lien note. LLOPA protested that the *90demand was too high, but went ahead and paid the amount demanded to avoid foreclosure on the property securing the note and sued for the; claimed overpayment. On motion for summary judgment, Nagel proved that the amount paid by LLOPA was the proper amount due on the note. Accordingly, Nagel was entitled to summary judgment unless LLOPA presented competent summary judgment proof raising a fact issue concerning the amount due. City of Houston v. Clear Creek Basin Auth., 589 S.W.2d 671, 678-79 (Tex.1979). The trial court evidently found LLOPA had failed to raise a fact issue and granted Nagel’s motion for summary judgment.

Discussion

The majority reverses the summary judgment on the basis that the trial court misapplied the burden of proof, holding, unaccountably, that Nagel’s own affidavit created a fact issue on the amount due when he said he had “no knowledge of any agreement or contract ... which would alter the amount of monies _” (emphasis mine). Slip op. at 89. Na-gel’s disclaimer, according to the majority, is directly controverted by LLOPA’s affidavit that it paid, under protest, “more than [it] felt was owed.” Id. Neither of these statements, however, assert unequivocal facts that conflict on a material issue. Rather, the former statement denies knowledge of a material fact, while the latter statement asserts only a subjective belief. More importantly, in apparent reference to two note extension agreements that were not part of the record, the majority asserts that “Nagel’s lack of personal knowledge of a fact necessary to prove LLOPA’s cause of action does not conclusively prove that the fact does not exist.” Id. This latter assertion demonstrates that it is the majority, not the trial court, that has misapplied the burden of proof. As noted above, in order to prevail on his motion for summary judgment, Nagel was not required to prove that the two extension agreements did not exist or that they did not affect the amount due. Indeed, the supreme court has held that “[n]o longer must the movant negate all possible issues of law and fact that could be raised by the non-movant in the trial court but were not.” Clear Creek Basin Auth., 589 S.W.2d at 678-79 (emphasis in original). Nagel was only required to prove the amount then due on the note, which he did. See Friendswood Dev. Co. v. McDade & Co., 926 S.W.2d 280, 282 (Tex. 1996) (right to summary judgment established by conclusively proving all elements of affirmative defense). Once that was done, it became LLO-PA’s burden to raise a fact issue to avoid summary judgment. See Clear Creek Basin Auth., 589 S.W.2d at 678-79.
As indicated, the majority appears to rely on the existence of two note extension agreements to bolster its argument that a fact issue was created. The assumption made is that Nagel won his summary judgment in the trial court only because LLOPA faded to prove up the agreements. But we cannot know, because the agreements are outside the record, whether they would have affected the amount due on the note. However, even as the majority reiterates the inadmissibility of the extension agreements, they are nonetheless drawn into the analysis by the assertion that LLOPA’s affidavits “directly controvert” Nagel’s disclaimer of any agreements that “would alter the amount of monies owed.” It is precisely this “controverted proof’ on which the majority reverses the case.
LLOPA’s summary judgment evidence consisted entirely of two affidavits. In the first, Paul Holekamp, LLOPA’s representative, testified that the amount paid to Nagel “was paid under protest because it was more than I felt was owed,” and that it “was excessive because it failed to reflect the two Extension of Note and Lien instruments.” In the second affidavit, Michael Henry, LLO-PA’s attorney, authenticated a letter he sent to Nagel at the time of payment wherein he stated the payment to Nagel was “involuntary and under protest” and that LLOPA “retained] all rights ... arising out of the overpayment .... ”
At best, the Holekamp affidavit consisted of no more than his subjective belief that LLOPA paid more than was owed under the note. Actually, it is worse than that. The affidavit expresses only Holekamp’s feelings about what was owed, omitting any factual *91basis for Ms feelings. The statement is an obvious conclusion and far from an assertion of fact. Also conelusory is the statement that the payment was excessive because it lacked a factual basis. Without an assertion of fact placing the amount owed on the note in dispute, the affidavit is incompetent to avoid summary judgment. “[Slubjective beliefs are no more than conclusions and are not competent summary judgment evidence.” Texas Division-Tranter, Inc. v. Carrozza, 876 S.W.2d 312, 314 (Tex. 1994) (per curiam); Brownlee v. Brownlee, 665 S.W.2d 111, 112 (Tex. 1984) (“Affidavits consisting only of conclusions are insufficient to raise an issue of fact.”); Hidalgo v. Surety Sav. & Loan Assoc., 487 S.W.2d 702, 703 (Tex. 1972) (per curiam) (conclusions are not competent summary judgment evidence). The attorney’s letter stating that LLOPA was paying under protest and reserved all rights also fails to raise a fact issue on the amount due on the note. The statement merely expresses an intention to make a claim in that regard.
Because the rales governing the competency of affidavits are so well-settled, they are difficult to overlook when determining the validity of summary judgment affidavits. And indeed the majority has not made that mistake. In fact, the majority recognizes and correctly applies the law by dismissing as incompetent that portion of Holekamp’s affidavit attempting to convert LLOPA’s interrogatory answers into summary judgment proof “because the affidavit does not set out the facts themselves unequivocally and in admissible form so that they might be tested for perjury,” citing Brownlee and other authorities. Slip op. at 87. Clearly, then, it is not a misunderstanding of the law that leads to the majority’s erroneous conclusion in tMs case. It is instead an inconsistent application of the law that allows the result here.
The majority gives probative force to such conelusory and equivocal statements as “I paid more than I felt was owed,” while disregarding the rules for admissibility it had previously applied. What the majority appears to have done is string together a series of inadmissible “facts” surmised from LLO-PA’s incompetent affidavits, combine them with facts not in evidence, i.e., the note extension agreements, and arrive at an inference deemed sufficient to create a fact issue on the amount due on the note. Although all reasonable inferences must be indulged in favor of the non-movant, see Nixon v. Mr. Property Management Co., 690 S.W.2d 546, 549 (Tex. 1985), no inferences can be drawn in the absence of facts. Without a factual basis, any asserted inference is no more than speculation and is unreasonable. The majority acknowledged this when it overruled LLOPA’s first point of error, correctly rejecting as speculative LLOPA’s attempt to draw an inference from inconclusive accounting records. See Slip op. at 86-87. But the principle was inexplicably disregarded when the majority found that a fact issue was raised even in the absence of any true facts asserted by LLOPA.

Conclusion

The majority concludes its analysis by holding that “the amount owed is in dispute” and Nagel was not entitled to a summary judgment. This conclusion can only be arrived at by unreasonably inferring facts in the absence of any facts, and by considering evidence that cannot be considered. The holding is based on a series of meaningless statements that, when taken together, raise no more than a mere suspicion that LLOPA paid too much on the note. In short, there is no evidence that the amount owed is in dispute.
Because LLOPA failed to adequately controvert Nagel’s summary judgment proof, the summary judgment in favor of Nagel should be affirmed. Accordingly, I dissent.2

. On this date the majority denies the appellees’ motion for rehearing. I withdraw my March 31, 1997 dissent and substitute this one.

. I also disagree with the majority’s heavy criticism of Nagel for taking what the majority apparently considers to be an unreasonable position that LLOPA had unconditionally tendered its note payment without protest. The majority writes that "[e]veryone familiar with this case. *92except, apparently, Nagel, knows there is a letter from appellant's attorney to Nagel making payment in full,under protest.” Slip op. at 88. The criticism is unfair. A careful reading of the pleadings shows Nagel’s position was based on the unconditional nature of the cashier’s check that was delivered to Nagel by LLOPA. See Tex. Bus. & Com. Code Ann. § 3.106 (Vernon Supp. 1997). The cashier's check failed to reference any express condition to payment and was thus *93an unconditional payment by virtue of the statute.