ETP & Enterprise Battle before the Dallas Court of Appeals

© 2016 The Texas Lawbook.By Mark Curriden (April 20) – The 2014 landmark Texas jury verdict that legally established a business version of common law marriage and resulted in a $535 million judgment against Houston-based Enterprise Products Partners should be reversed because it is based on bad interpretation of partnership law and is unsupported facts in the case, a lawyer for Enterprise told the Texas Court of Appeals in Dallas Wednesday. “There are serious legal flaws with this verdict,” David Keltner, a former appeals court judge told a three-judge panel of the Dallas Court of Appeals. “It needs to be reversed.” Not true, argued lawyers from Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners. “This is a big dollar case because Enterprise stole a big dollar opportunity from us,” Nina Cortell, an appellate law specialist representing ETP responded during 55 minutes of oral arguments. The four-year long billion-dollar legal dispute erupted in 2012 when ETP sued Enterprise for violating a partnership the two oil and gas pipeline giants formed to build a pipeline from Cushing, Okla. to Houston and instead negotiated a secret identical deal with rival Enbridge Partners of Canada for $4.4 billion. Enterprise argues there was no legal partnership because it didn’t…