Court Opinion

ID: 9661667
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 22:45:56.448717+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:14:31.936250
License: Public Domain

MARGARET GARNER MIRABAL, Senior Justice,
concurring.
SUBSTITUTED CONCURRING OPINION
I respectfully concur in the result only.
I particularly note the different path I would take to the result reached under Section III B of the majority opinion, dealing with the alleged misrepresentations during the negotiation process.
This ease involves a common situation. The parties to the litigation entered into settlement negotiations. The parties did not reduce their negotiated agreement, if any, to writing. Thus, the agreement, if any, was not enforceable and could not reasonably have been relied on by either side. See Padilla v. LaFrance, 907 S.W.2d 454, 459-61 (Tex.1995), and its progeny.1

. I respectfully disagree with the majority opinion’s reliance on the three cases: Coastal Bank; McCamish, Martin, Brown & Loeffler; and Chapman Children’s Trust. All three cases involved evaluative 1ypes of misrepresentations, such as: statement that the bank’s history was "very satisfactory” (Coastal Bank, 135 S.W.3d at 842-43); an opinion that the *428Trusts were guilty of tortiously interfering with the settlement agreement (Chapman, 32 S.W.3d at 443); statement about past Board actions in the process of giving guidance (McCamish, 991 S.W.2d at 789-90). None of these cases dealt with an alleged agreement by a party or attorney to affirmatively act, or refrain from acting, in the future, as in the present case. If the alleged agreements in the present case had been reduced to writing, it appears the majority would still hold that reliance on the agreements would not have been justifiable because the representations of agreement took place in an adversarial context (as the representations in McCamish were in writing, 991 S.W.2d at 789). To the contrary, I conclude these three cases are distinguishable from, and inapplicable to, the present case.