Out in the Country.

Out in the country, one piece of land can have five people with a right to be on it: the family that owns the surface, the company that holds the mineral lease, the hunters who lease the deer season, the rancher who leases the grazing, and the utility or pipeline that holds an easement across it. When someone is hurt there, the first job is not to guess who was at fault. It is to find out who was there, who controlled what, and whose insurance stands behind each of them.

Rural cases are also harder to prove. There are fewer witnesses and fewer cameras, help takes longer to arrive, and the scene is usually on private land the owner controls. The evidence that matters, the equipment, the lease, the gate log, the line, has to be found and preserved before anyone decides it is not worth keeping.

The landowner.

What an owner owed you depends on why you were there, the same rule that runs through premises liability everywhere in Texas. Out in the country, two statutes change the answer. If you were there for recreation, hunting, fishing, and the like, the recreational use statute limits the owner’s duty to the duty owed a trespasser, with an edge at gross negligence (The Stand walks through it). If you were a contractor, or a contractor’s employee, working on a building, a line, a pump, or another improvement on the land, Chapter 95 may require proof that the owner kept control of the work and actually knew of the danger.

The power line.

Electrocution cases on rural land usually involve two separate duties. Texas law defines high voltage as more than 600 volts. Unless the danger of contact is guarded against, no one may perform a function or activity where it is possible that a person, or any part of a tool, equipment, machine, or material, will come within six feet of a high-voltage overhead line, and no one may require an employee to do it. Whoever is responsible for temporary work closer than that must notify the line’s operator at least 48 hours before the work begins, and may not begin until an arrangement is made to de-energize and ground the line, move or raise it, or put up mechanical barriers (Health and Safety Code Chapter 752). The company or cooperative that runs the line is a separate party, and its records about that line belong in the file.

The worker.

When the person hurt was working the ranch, the first question is the employer’s insurance. Texas lets private employers go without workers’ compensation, and an employer that goes without it gives up its usual defenses in a lawsuit (non-subscriber injuries). When the employer did carry it, the claim against the employer runs through that system, and the case against everyone else on the land, the owner, the operator, the maker of the equipment, stays open (third-party claims).

The insurance.

A ranch may carry its own liability policy, and a lease may require the lessee to carry one too. Some of the law is written around insurance: the recreational use statute protects an owner who charges for recreation only if the charges stay under its limit or the owner carries the coverage it requires. Finding every policy that may apply, the owner’s, the lessee’s, the operator’s, the contractor’s, the driver’s, is part of the first week’s work.

The court.

A family hurt in rural Texas usually files where it happened, in the district court of that county, in front of a jury from home. When a defendant is an out-of-state company, it will often try to move the case to federal court on diversity of citizenship, which requires citizens of different states and more than seventy-five thousand dollars in controversy (28 U.S.C. 1332). Two rules push back. A case removable only on diversity “may not be removed if any of the parties in interest properly joined and served as defendants is a citizen of the State in which such action is brought” (28 U.S.C. 1441(b)(2)). And a Texas family’s case against a Texas landowner is not diverse at all.

The defense’s usual answer is that the local defendant was improperly joined, named only to keep the case out of federal court. The Fifth Circuit’s test, set by the full court in 2004, asks whether “there is no reasonable basis for the district court to predict that the plaintiff might be able to recover against an in-state defendant.” A landowner belongs in the case because of what the landowner did or failed to do, not because of where the landowner lives. When the owner really did control the danger, that test sends the case back to the county where it happened, which is where the South Texas pages on this site say these cases belong.

What I look for first.

The leases and the easements, which are usually recorded in the county. Who controlled the work, the gate, the equipment, and the line, in writing and in practice. The policy declarations for every party with a right to be on the land. Photographs and measurements before the scene changes: the ladder, the stand, the height of the line, the distance to the work. The property tax record, because the recreational use statute is written around it. And the names of everyone who was there, because out in the country there are only a few.