The Fort Worth Court of Appeals held that the “strip and gore doctrine” applied to a 1984 conveyance of 76 acres, causing the conveyance to also include a severed mineral interest underlying an adjacent 8.25-acre strip of land.
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In response to COVID-19, many companies and their employees have quickly shifted to a “work from home” model. Even though email has been a large part of business for decades, the new “remote” reality has only increased our reliance on electronic communications. In a pair of recent cases, the Texas Supreme Court was tasked with deciding what role email plays in contract formation. As companies continue to conduct an extensive amount of business electronically, it is important to keep in mind what effect courts will give to agreements formed through email conversations.
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In this leasehold adverse possession case, the Fort Worth Court of Appeals held that an acknowledgement of the record title holder’s title by an adverse possessor will not defeat an adverse possession claim if the limitations clock had already run out before the acknowledgement occurred. The trial court granted summary judgment in favor of the oil and gas company on their affirmative defense of adverse possession and limitations title under the five-year statute.
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In this case, the Corpus Christi Court of Appeals held that, when grantors of a 1989 warranty deed signed division orders and accepted royalty payments consistent with treatment of the reservation as creating a joint tenancy with right of survivorship, that established an affirmative defense of quasi-estoppel, subsequently estopping those grantors’ heirs from claiming the reservation created a tenancy in common.
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In this case, the Eastland Court of Appeals held that a devise of “personal effects” in a will did not include special mineral interests.
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In this business torts case between pipeline monitoring companies, Houston’s First Court of Appeals held that the trial court erred by denying a motion to dismiss pursuant to the Texas Citizens Participation Act (TCPA). At issue were causes of action for defamation, business disparagement, tortious interference with contract, and tortious interference with prospective business relations. Each of these causes of action centered around an alleged conversation where Kelly McDonald contacted a former client of 3B Inspection, and said 3B was “not a real company” and its principal “did not know what he was doing.” 3B also asserted that McDonald Oilfield intentionally cancelled sponsorship of federal “Operator Qualifications,” allegedly with “malicious intent to shut down the project and cause harm to 3B Inspection’s business relationship with its client.”
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The Plaintiffs, a putative class of lessors under oil and gas leases, brought claims against Talisman Energy USA, Inc. (“Talisman”) relating to Talisman’s “volumetric” method of calculating royalties. Some of the gas produced is “wet gas,” which requires stabilization prior to sale, which results in a reduction or “shrinkage” of the volume sold. Talisman commingled the production from numerous leases for processing at the stabilization facility, and then allocated the sales volumes back to individual leases on the basis of wellhead metered volumes (a “volumetric” allocation), and applied an estimate of overall shrinkage.
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