Last week, the Texas Supreme Court decided to take up a nuclear personal injury case that resulted in a $92 million judgment against trucking company Werner Enterprises. 

TLR filed an amicus brief in this case urging the court to uphold what’s called the Admission Rule, a longstanding legal principle that allows a company defendant to simplify a lawsuit by taking legal responsibility for the actions of its employee. 

In this case, a pickup truck was driving down an icy stretch of I-20 near Odessa when it hit a patch of black ice and skidded across a 42-foot grassy median into oncoming traffic, where it hit Werner’s truck head on. Werner’s truck was going 50 miles per hour—well under the speed limit—immediately tried to stop, never lost control and violated no traffic laws. Unfortunately, the resulting accident led to the death and permanent injuries of two children in the pickup.

As the state trooper who investigated the collision noted in his report, it was “truly an accident,” Werner’s driver “didn’t do anything wrong” and there was nothing “he could have done to avoid the collision.” At trial, the driver of the pickup that lost control made statements alluding to his own responsibility for the accident.

So how, then, did the jury find Werner 70 percent liable and its driver 14 percent liable for an unavoidable accident?

The answer lies in part in the inconsistent application of the Admission Rule by both the trial and appellate courts in this case. 

According to the trucking publication, Landline:

Werner argues that since it accepted responsibility by admitting Ali [its driver] was in the course and scope of employment, plaintiffs cannot pursue “derivative theories of negligence.” Known as the Admission Rule, once an employer establishes liability, “evidence of the employer’s hiring, training or supervision practices becomes inadmissible as irrelevant and likely to prejudice the jury,” according to the law firm Lewis Brisbois.

In this case, the appellate and district courts rejected the Admission Rule by allowing a variety of evidence dealing with Werner’s companywide policies and training. This in turn allowed plaintiff attorneys to use a tactic known as reptile theory, which evokes emotions of fear and anger in jurors to encourage nuclear verdicts. As Lewis Brisbois put it, “This company was so terrible you should punish them, regardless of whether any of our evidence showed the company or its driver’s actions actually caused the subject crash.”

When the trial court ignored the Admission Rule, it opened the floodgates for irrelevant evidence to be used against Werner, with the plaintiff’s attorney even admitting “Our case was about everything but the three-second crash sequence.” 

As another amicus brief noted, “Because appropriate boundaries were not in place via the Admission Rule, plaintiffs’ counsel was allowed to argue everything from how Werner should have built a weather command center to how Werner should have given [its driver] a company email address.”

TLR’s brief noted that the Admission Rule has been upheld by at least eight Texas state courts of appeals, as well as Texas federal courts and courts in 15 other states and the District of Columbia. Additionally, the Legislature codified the Admissions Rule in 2021’s HB 19, as part of the new two-part system for trying commercial vehicle lawsuits in Texas.

If the case had been tried under HB 19 with the application of the Admission Rule, Werner’s acceptance of responsibility for its employee’s actions would have meant that the first phase the trial would have been dedicated to what actually happened during the “the three-second crash sequence,” without the introduction of irrelevant evidence that had nothing to do with the accident. Then, if necessary, phase two of the trial would have determined if Werner was grossly negligent and deserved to be punished based on its safety record and company policies.

But that’s not what happened here. HB 19 was not passed by the Legislature until after the Werner case was tried, and the trial court ignored the Admission Rule. 

If allowed to stand, the trial and appellate courts’ failure to apply the Admission Rule in the Werner case would be an abrupt departure from decades of precedent and an unjustified expansion of employer liability, not just for commercial vehicle operators, but for every employer in Texas.

The Texas Supreme Court will hear arguments in Werner’s case on December 3.