Court Opinion

ID: 9773746
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 17:57:33.217486+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:31:56.917550
License: Public Domain

GRANT, Justice,
concurring.
It is a desirable goal to avoid punitive sanctions being imposed against a party when the basis is solely the conduct of the party’s attorney. I also agree that it is laudable to try to avoid sanctions that prevent the case from being decided upon its merits. Nevertheless, it is necessary for the trial judge to enforce the procedural requirements to achieve a fair trial.
*85Our courts have moved to a system geared to avoid trial by ambush and to place each party in a position of entering the trial on an equal basis. When the trial court has entered an agreed pretrial order requiring the parties to furnish a list of the witnesses who will be called to testify, fairness would dictate that each side should be provided such a list. This Court recently reversed and remanded a case to the trial court because the trial court had not excluded evidence from witnesses that was newly discovered and contrary to their depositions. Lucas v. Titus County Mem’l Hosp., 964 S.W.2d 144 (Tex. App.—Texarkana, 1998, n.w.h.). We remanded the ease because we determined that supplementation of discovery was mandatory in such a situation, and a failure of supplementation placed the opposing counsel in a position of being unprepared to address the new matters presented by this evidence.
The question that arises in the present case is what would have been the appropriate sanctions for the trial judge to impose that would not have been detrimental to one party or the other. In this type of case, to avoid the death-penalty-type sanctions, the court could have imposed sanctions against the attorney only without affecting the trial of the case. But in addition to this, if requested, the trial court might be required to continue the case to give the other side the opportunity to prepare for witnesses who had not been designated. Even when the potential witnesses have been deposed, it cannot be assumed that the opposing side has prepared for the testimony of those witnesses who have not been designated.
The sanctions in this case have a direct relationship to the offensive conduct, but without less stringent sanctions and warnings, would not satisfy the second prong set out in the Supreme Court case of Trans-American Natural Gas Corp. v. Powell, 811 S.W.2d 913 (Tex.1991).
This case imposes a difficult burden on trial judges who have trial schedules that are thwarted by a failure of counsel to comply with an agreed pretrial order, but in the interest of justice this may be the only appropriate approach.
OPINION ON MOTION FOR REHEARING
We write separately on rehearing to address two matters raised in the appellees’ motion for rehearing. First, the appellees assert that our opinion creates a conflict in the courts of appeals and, specifically, that it is in conflict -with the Fort Worth Court of Appeals, the court from which this case was transferred. Second, we write to resolve any confusion about whether our opinion also affects documents which were undesignated under the terms of the trial court’s pretrial order.
The appellees first complain that, since this is a case transferred from the Fort Worth court, this Court should have followed the holdings of the Fort Worth court. By failing to do so, they argue, this Court reached an opposite conclusion from that which would have been reached by the Fort Worth court. We believe that we are not to isolate a single intermediate appellate court’s precedent to use as a guide for our conclusions. Rather, we are required to ascertain what the law is of the state of Texas and apply that law to the facts of a given case, whether that case is a transferred case or a case from our own district.
Our sister court in San Antonio recently addressed this very issue. American Nat’l Ins. Co. v. International Bus. Machs. Corp., 933 S.W.2d 685 (Tex.App.—San Antonio 1996, writ denied). In American National, the dissent brought up the same issue which the appellees raise here. We agree with the majority’s response, which states:
The theory of our law is that the State of Texas has but one law on any given subject, and that the law is as proclaimed by the courts of appeals and finally, in civil cases, by the Texas Supreme Court.
This theory acknowledges that there may be differences of opinion among the courts of appeals as to what that law is. The remedy for such conflicts or errors is an appeal to the Texas Supreme Court. Tex. Gov’t Code Ann. § 22.001(a)(2)(6) (Vernon 1988).
Conflicts of law rules make sense when applied to separate sovereigns, whether *86nations or sovereign states, because in those instances there really can be conflicts in the law from one sovereign state or nation to the other. Where, however, there is only one sovereign, a court of appeals’ duty is to decide and apply the law of that sovereign, not to ascertain the law as stated in a given district, whether its own or the district from which a ease has been transferred. The State of Texas consists of only one sovereign state, not fourteen.
We acknowledge that there can be problems caused by the fact that Texas is such a large and diverse state, that we have fourteen courts of appeals districts, and that cases are transferred from one of those districts to other districts where the justices’ views of what the law of Texas is may differ from the justices of the court from which the case arose. We believe, however, that the answer to those difficulties lies in an appeal to the Texas Supreme Court, in civil cases, or to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, in criminal cases, rather than in an effort on our part to be parochial in our application of the law to the facts presented us.
American Nat’l Ins. Co., 933 S.W.2d at 688. We endorse the San Antonio court’s analysis. Therefore, if a conflict exists between our decision and the stare decisis of the Fort Worth court, it is for the Texas Supreme Court to resolve.
As for the second issue on rehearing, whether undesignated documents were properly excluded from the trial due to the appellants’ failure to comply with the pretrial order, we express no opinion. This issue was not preserved below, and we may not review it on appeal. The appellants presented only fact witnesses at trial and did not attempt to present any undesignated documents. The appellants presented fact witnesses, drew objections from the appellees as to each one, and the trial judge sustained each objection. The appellants then presented bills of exception for each fact witness objected to by the appellees. This properly preserved the issue as to whether the fact witnesses were improperly excluded for our review. Tex. R.App. P. 33.1. However, since no undesig-nated documents were offered, there was no adverse ruling of the trial court with regard to those documents, and no error is preserved for our review.
Appellees’ motion for rehearing is overruled.