AUSTIN, Texas (Legal Newsline) - On March 27, the Supreme Court of Texas reversed summary judgment previously granted to Steak N Shake in a lawsuit stemming from a worker's claims that her boss sexually assaulted her.
Steak N Shake requested summary judgment with traditional and no-evidence grounds in a combined motion, which the trial court granted, and the appeals court affirmed. The case then went to the Supreme Court, which remanded it back to the appeals court. That court then raised several issues that the Supreme Court addressed in the current opinion.
Steak N Shake was the party that had to show that it was owed judgment via a matter of law, notwithstanding B.C.’s response, or her failure to respond. Interestingly enough, B.C.’s alleged untimeliness is the current common issue in the case.
Her response was due seven days before the summary judgment hearing. She said she tried to submit it electronically but couldn’t “because one of the exhibits was not formatted for optical character recognition,” according to the opinion. She then said during proceedings that the rejected filing should be considered as her official response.
But because she postponed arguing her case until the appeals court said her response was untimely, the Supreme Court was challenged to determine if the trial court took her untimely response into consideration when it ruled in favor of Steak N Shake.
“The trial court’s recital that it considered the ‘evidence and arguments of counsel,’ without any limitation, is an ‘affirmative indication’ that the trial court considered B.C.’s response and the evidence attached to it,” the Supreme Court ruled.
It continued and said since the trial court measured the “pleadings, evidence, and arguments of counsel,” the appeals court was mandated to do the same when it evaluated the trial court’s ruling.
Because of this, the Supreme Court reversed the court of appeals’ ruling without hearing oral argument, and remanded the case back to that court.