Today, the Texas Supreme Court handed down In re: Labatt Food Service, L.P., __ S.W.3d _ Texas (2009) (Cause No. 07-0419). The opinion resolves the issue of whether nonsignatories to an arbitration agreement should be compelled to arbitrate claims when the decedent’s claims would have to be arbitrated. On a related note, S.B. 222 is currently being considered by the Texas Legislature. The bill deals, in part, with the extension of the Texas

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Perry Homes has once again been applied to describe what constitutes an arbitration waiver, except this time no waiver was found. As we have mentioned before in While We Were Out, a post from May, waiver is hard to come by in a Texas Supreme Court opinion. Perry Homes could have moved us into a parallel universe in which claiming waiver of arbitration is a winning argument. But those who criticized the opinion knew we would be making no such move

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Well, it took a couple weeks, but the Texas Supreme Court has reverted to its pre-Perry Homes stance on the circumstances in which a party may or may not waive its right to compel arbitration. On Friday, while we were otherwise indisposed and unable to blog, the Texas Supreme Court found that a party’s decision to remove a case to federal court (and then agree to a remand back to state court) did not “substantially invoke the judicial

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I picked the wrong week to go on vacation. While I was on an airplane coming back from France, the Texas Supreme Court issued its long-awaited opinion in the Perry Homes Case. The Texas legal blogosphere has already been all over it, and the Supreme Court of Texas Blog has posted a nice recap of the commentary. At the risk of coming to the party late, we’ll still offer some comments on Friday’s opinion. Robert and Jane Cull bought a h

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Today, the Texas Supreme Court handed down nineteen (19) opinions. None of them, however, has anything to do with arbitration. One of them, though, resolved an issue which has divided the courts of appeals and with which we had to grapple not too long ago. Since we have not been blogging much lately (we’ve been working a lot), we thought we’d mention it. As of today, Rule 202 no longer allows the pre-lawsuit deposition of a physician

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In the context of a slightly complicated procedural situation, the Texas Supreme Court made the following ruling earlier today: in a case where a court compels arbitration, the party resisting arbitration files a petition for mandamus challenging arbitration, the petition is denied, the party loses the arbitration, and the party resists confirmation of the award without success, in that case, the party is still able to challenge arbitrability in

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The Texas Supreme Court issued a per curiam mandamus opinion compelling an arbitration this morning in a class action suit which alleges that a home builder built a bunch of houses without shower pans. The opinion is not long, but it quickly dispenses with a number of the common contractual arguments parties raise when seeking to avoid arbitration. In other words, it is a handy primer for this type of arbitrability challenge, offering a sort of c

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We’ve blogged before, on numerous occasions, about McCarran-Ferguson Reverse Preemption of the Federal Arbitration Act. Specifically, we’ve blogged about the Kepka case out of Houston, whereby the Court held that Texas medical malpractice legislation, which holds that an agreement to arbitrate a med-mal case must be signed by both the plaintiff and the plaintiff’s attorney, was legislation to regulate the insurance industry, and

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As the Texas Appellate Law blog has noted, the Texas Supreme Court was busy today, releasing “a slew of 13 opinions.” Many of them, on first blush, look interesting. None of them, however, talks about arbitration. Well, that’s not exactly true. One of the opinions came from a case “almost identical” to last week’s Merrill Lynch arbitration case. The quite short opinion simply states that this week’s Merri

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As you can see, today was a big day at the Texas Supreme Court. The Court handed down three arbitration opinions, as well as a handful of other opinions on other issues. We’ve already blogged about arbitration opinions one and two, but this one is, we think, the most interesting. Today, you see, the Texas Supreme Court refused to adopt concerted-misconduct equitable estoppel as a means by which non-signatories to an agreement to arbitrate c

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