Fiduciary Duty—The SCOTX Report

23-0045·Other

Texas's civil barratry statute, Government Code § 82.0651(a), does not reach non-Texas clients' claims to void legal-services contracts that were solicited and procured outside Texas: the statute does not clearly apply extraterritorially, and the conduct it focuses on, the solicitation that procured the contract, occurred in Louisiana and Arkansas, so applying it would be impermissibly extraterritorial even though some financing occurred in Texas.
The clients' fiduciary-duty claims against the lawyers are independent of the barratry statute and survive: res judicata from a Louisiana fee proceeding, limitations, and improper joinder did not entitle the lawyers to summary judgment on them.

23-0329·Petition For Review

A partner's appellate brief that argued he had standing to assert derivative claims and that the defendant owed fiduciary duties to the business entities did not waive his appeal of the dismissal of those derivative claims, so the court of appeals must reach them.
Fact issues do not preclude summary judgment against a partner's claim that his co-venturer owed him individual fiduciary duties, because the claim was not properly asserted or established in the trial court and he conceded it made no difference given his derivative claims; the court of appeals also correctly held fact issues on limitations and that the Dead Man's Rule bars the surviving partner's testimony that the decedent approved the expenditures.

23-0427·Petition For Review

The anti-fracturing rule bars a client from recasting a professional negligence claim as fraud or another claim to gain a litigation advantage such as a longer limitations period; a fraud claim whose gravamen is that accountants made accounting errors and overstated their competence is barred.
A breach of fiduciary duty claim against accountants fails as a matter of law where the only basis is an "informal" fiduciary relationship built on friendship and a client's subjective trust, and the engagement letters set an arm's-length relationship.

24-0024·Mandamus

Individual shareholders of a Maryland real estate investment trust may not sue the trust's advisors directly on an advisory agreement that says the advisor is in a fiduciary relationship "to the Trust and its Shareholders," because the phrase refers to the shareholders collectively and creates no duty to individual shareholders distinct from the duty to the entity.
The shareholders therefore lack capacity to bring claims the trust owns and must pursue them derivatively under the trust documents' exclusive Maryland forum, so the trial court erred in denying the advisors' plea in abatement and the Court conditionally granted mandamus directing dismissal with prejudice.

25-0303·Petition For Review

Whether a court of appeals may decline to reach the merits of an appellant's challenges, including to a $10 million attorney's-fee award and a salary disgorgement award and to the fiduciary-duty and attorney-immunity rulings for a company's general counsel, by finding them inadequately briefed or waived, given this Court's directive that waiver be a last resort.
Whether failing to request additional findings of fact under Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 298 forfeits an appellant's right to challenge the legal and factual sufficiency of the evidence supporting express or deemed findings after a bench trial.