Venue and “Principal Offices”

Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 15.002(a)(3) authorizes venue “[i]n the county of the defendant’s principal office in this state, if the defendant is not a natural person.”

Case law further says that a corporation may have more than one principal office in Texas, and that to qualify as a “principal office” location, the plaintiff must show that “the employees in the county where the lawsuit was filed (1) are ‘decision makers’ for the company, and (2) have ‘substantially equal responsibility and authority’ relative to other company officials within the state and case law.”

Logical enough, but still short on specifics. That’s why the Fifth Court’s recent opinion in Deere & Co. v. Bernal, building on an earlier Fifth Court case about this statute, is a helpful contribution. After a detailed review of the record about the responsibilities of a Dallas-based John Deere manager, the court held:

We see no meaningful distinction from the facts described in Roach that Deere’s system of routing certain parts to certain destinations preempts any higher level day-to-day decision making by the manager of the Dallas regional distribution center. Schick’s affidavit and deposition testimony, described above, identified numerous areas—other than the routing of particular parts—in which the manager of the regional distribution center is the authoritative figure in managing the regional facility and its layers and departments of employees. Schick did not identify a decision maker of higher authority in Texas who made day-to-day decisions in running the company, the employees, and the facility than the manager of the Dallas regional distribution center. 

No. 05-22-00916-CV (Jan. 17, 2023) (mem. op.).