Houston shareholder Steve Grubbs and Of Counsel Sean O’Neal Braun, together with co-counsel Ryan Martin of Clark Hill, recently secured a defense verdict for a land-drilling company after an eight-day jury trial in Harris County District Court. Plaintiffs asked the jury to award $61 million in compensatory damages but recovered nothing from our client.
The case arose from a pre-dawn collision in West Texas between a pickup carrying the two plaintiffs and a tractor-trailer owned by an independent trucking company. The trucking company’s driver was hauling an empty trailer to pick up the drilling company’s equipment when he turned left across oncoming traffic. By trial, the trucking company and its driver were no longer parties, which left our client as the only defendant.
Plaintiffs argued that the drilling company negligently selected the trucking company, that the driver was on a mission the drilling company controlled, and that the driver was the drilling company’s borrowed employee. Plaintiffs’ damages experts projected roughly $20 million in economic damages and Plaintiffs asked the jury for another $40 million in non-economic damages. Plaintiffs also sought exemplary damages for gross negligence.
The defense countered that our client was a customer of transportation services, not a motor carrier. The trucking company—an independent contractor and a federally registered motor carrier—owned the tractor-trailer, employed and dispatched the driver, and controlled the details of the driver’s work.
The jury accepted the defense’s account. After less than two hours of deliberations, the jury rejected both vicarious liability theories and unanimously found that our client was not negligent—assigning it zero percent of the responsibility for the crash.
Paralegal Cindy Smith and file clerk Connor Oelsen provided critical support to the trial team.
