Law360 (October 8, 2019, 8:20 PM EDT) -- Copano Energy LLC told the Texas Supreme Court in oral arguments on Tuesday that email exchanges between its representatives and an attorney for a landowner discussing the price the company would pay for an easement are not enough to sustain the breach-of-contract suit it is now facing.
Copano Energy is trying to overturn a ruling from the Thirteenth Court of Appeals allowing the claims from landowner Stanley Bujnoch to proceed, arguing the ruling doesn't adhere to the Texas Statute of Frauds, which requires certain kinds of contracts to be in writing to be valid.
Copano argues that the email exchanges between its representatives and Bujnoch about a price for the easement that was never honored isn't enough to sustain an agreement to buy the pipeline easement because the emails don't contain "an offer and acceptance of all essential terms," while Bujnoch disagrees.
Justice Jane Bland asked counsel for Copano, D. Mitchell McFarland of Munsch Hardt Kopf & Harr, P.C., to explain how there's no agreement to purchase the easement when one of the emails from a Copano representative to Bujnoch's attorney references an apparently agreed-upon, $70-per-foot price for the easement, and said the "deal still stands."
McFarland said the court has held in previous cases that this type of exchange is "not enough" to adhere to the statute of frauds.
"[The deal] still stands without a property description and without a description of who the clients are," he said, detailing why he believes the emails are insufficient to establish there's a contract. "There's no doubt that they knew what they were talking about, but that is also true in all of these cases that this court has decided for decades regarding the statute of frauds."
