Reeder John v. Billie Brewer Curry

426 S.W.3d 352, 2014 WL 1100164, 2014 Tex. App. LEXIS 3143
CourtCourt of Appeals of Texas
DecidedMarch 20, 2014
Docket05-12-00836-CV
StatusPublished
Cited by6 cases

This text of 426 S.W.3d 352 (Reeder John v. Billie Brewer Curry) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals of Texas primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Reeder John v. Billie Brewer Curry, 426 S.W.3d 352, 2014 WL 1100164, 2014 Tex. App. LEXIS 3143 (Tex. Ct. App. 2014).

Opinion

OPINION

Opinion by Justice MYERS.

On the Court’s own motion, we withdraw the opinion and vacate the judgment of December 31, 2013. The following is now the opinion of this Court.

John Reeder appeals the summary judgment that he take nothing on his claims against Billie Brewer - Curry, individually and as successor to W.C. Brewer, Deceased, and Trinity Materials, Inc. Reeder brings six issues asserting the trial court erred by granting appellees’ motion for summary judgment and by failing to grant a continuance of the summary judgment hearing. We affirm the trial court’s judgment.

BACKGROUND

In 1995, Reeder and Curry executed a contract for deed 1 in which Curry and her father purported to sell Reeder 608.48 acres. 2 Reeder agreed to make monthly payments to Curry for fifteen years. In 2001, Curry borrowed money from American National Bank and assigned the contract for deed to the bank. The bank instructed Reeder to make the monthly payments to it. In 2004, the IRS issued levy notices against Curry and instructed Reeder to pay the IRS any amounts he owed to Curry. According to Reeder, the confusion over whether he owed the monthly payment to the bank or to the IRS caused him to miss at least one payment. Curry declared Reeder in default under the contract for deed, declared the property forfeited, and stated she was keeping all the payments to that point as liquidated damages pursuant to the contract. Curry then sold the property to Trinity Materials and paid her debt to the bank. Reeder tried to send payments to the bank and Curry, but they both returned the payments stating they no longer had any interest in the property.

Reeder brought suit against Curry and Trinity for several causes of action, including specific performance and damages for breach of the contract for deed, trespass, *356 fraud, tortious interference with contract, and for injunctive relief. Curry and Trinity moved for summary judgment on Reed-er’s claims, which the trial court granted. Reeder appealed, and this Court reversed the summary judgment, concluding “a genuine issue of material fact exists on whether Reeder’s failure to make the payments for September and October was reasonable in light of the circumstances.” Reeder, 294 S.W.3d at 858. We remanded the case to the trial court for further proceedings. Id. at 862.

Back in the trial court, Curry and Trinity moved for summary judgment on Reed-er’s claims on the ground that the property description in the contract for deed was insufficient under the statute of frauds and no contract formed between Reeder and Curry. Reeder filed a motion to continue the summary judgment hearing while he conducted discovery and determined whether to bring an action to reform the contract to provide a sufficient description of the property. The trial court, denied Reeder’s motion for continuance and granted Curry and Trinity’s motion for summary judgment, rendering judgment that Reeder take nothing on his claims.

MOTION FOR CONTINUANCE

In his sixth issue, Reeder contends the trial court erred by denying his motion for continuance of the summary judgment hearing. We review a trial court’s decision to grant or deny a party additional time for discovery before a summary judgment hearing for an abuse of discretion. Cooper v. Circle Ten Council Boy Scouts of Am., 254 S.W.3d 689, 696 (Tex.App.-Dallas 2008, no pet.). A trial court abuses its discretion when it acts without reference to any guiding rules or principles. Downer v, Aquamarine Operators, Inc., 701 S.W.2d 238, 241-42 (Tex.1985). In considering whether the trial court abused its discretion, we consider such factors as the length of time the case had been on file before the hearing, the materiality of the discovery sought, whether the party seeking the continuance exercised due diligence in obtaining the discovery, and what the party expected to prove. Cooper, 254 S.W.3d at 696.

In the motion, Reeder stated he needed to take the deposition of a survey- or, Greg Sjerven. Sjerven stated in his affidavit that he could not do a survey of the property based on the property , description in the contract for deed, yet Reeder stated Sjerven did a survey of the land in 2006. Reeder also stated he needed to take Curry’s deposition because she stated in an affidavit that when she signed the contract for deed, she did not know what land she conveyed. Reeder also stated that further discovery was necessary to determine if the contract for deed was supposed to be for all the property Curry owned in those surveys, because if it was, then the property description was adequate. Reeder also stated that Curry used the same property description in the affidavit of forfeiture of the property. Reeder also stated in the motion that he wanted time to bring an action for reformation of the contract before the trial court heard the motion for summary judgment.

In this case, Reeder filed suit on November 30, 2004 and moved for continuance of the summary judgment hearing and modification of the scheduling order on March 26, 2012, over seven years later. More than one and one-half years had passed between this Court’s mandate remanding the case for further proceedings and the motion for continuance. Trinity had raised the defense of the statute of frauds in its first amended answer filed in July 2005. In January 2011, over a year before the summary judgment motion, *357 Trinity and Curry filed special exceptions to Reeder’s fourth amended petition complaining that the property description in the petition, which was the same as the description in the deed, “utterly fails to identify the property as required by Texas R. Civ. P. 783.” The trial court granted the special exception, giving Reeder fourteen days to replead using a metes-and-bounds description, but Reeder’s subsequent amended petitions referred only to the contract for deed and did not provide a metes-and-bounds description.

The record also shows Reeder deposed Curry on February 3, 2012 and Sjerven on April 5, 2012. Although Curry’s deposition occurred before appellees filed their motion for summary judgment asserting the inadequacy of the property description, Sj erven’s deposition was after the filing of the motion for summary judgment and one week before the April 12 summary judgment hearing. Reeder does not explain why Sjerven’s April 5, 2012 deposition did not provide Reeder the information he needed.

Reeder did not explain in his motion for continuance why the property description would be sufficient if it was for all the property Curry owned in each survey. Nor did he cite any authority in support of this assertion.

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Bluebook (online)
426 S.W.3d 352, 2014 WL 1100164, 2014 Tex. App. LEXIS 3143, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/reeder-john-v-billie-brewer-curry-texapp-2014.