Too-Wide Receiver

The Fifth Court received these facts in Yancey v. SLJ Co.:

• In July 2019, SLJ Company, LLC, obtained a $210,096.70 default judgment
  against Yancey, among others.
• After a January 2021 hearing on SLJ’s motion to appoint a receiver, the trial court appointed a receiver by a single-page order dated April 30, 2021.
• That receiver took no material actions, and then died in 2013.
• On December 11, 2023, SLJ filed an application for the turnover of non-exempt property and the appointment of a substitute receiver because the original receiver died.
• “Two days later, on December 13, 2023, the trial court signed a twenty-five-page order appointing receiver without conducting a hearing or providing notice to Yancey. Attached to the order was an eleven-page exhibit listing documents Yancey was ordered to deliver to the receiver within ten days of receipt of the order.”

The parties received the Court’s conclusion that this order was an abuse of discretion:

The record reveals no “great emergency or imperative necessity” requiring the appointment of a new receiver to replace the deceased receiver without notice or a hearing. n the contrary, the record suggests that no actions were taken with respect to the receivership between April 2021 and December 2023. The transcript of the January 2021 hearing on the first motion to appoint a receiver is in the record, but none of the squabbling over Yancey’s assets contained therein sheds light on her financial affairs nearly three years later in December 2023. Yet the trial court’s order, without notice or a hearing, provided the new receiver with comprehensive powers to assume Yancey’s property was not exempt; enter any real property or other premises where non-exempt property or Yancey’s records might be situated; and “employ reasonable destructive means to bypass or gain access to” non-exempt assets within any real property. 

No. 05-23-01285-CV (Aug. 21, 2025) (mem. op.) (citations omitted).