At 7:04 a.m. Feb. 11, about two-and-a-half hours before testimony was set to resume in the first jury trial in the Texas Business Court, Judge Sofia Adrogué received a text message from a bailiff.
“Good morning Judge,” Deputy James Williams’ text began. “Hate to bring you bad news this morning. …”
The trial, a historic first for the new court, began with jury selection Feb. 9 at the 1910 Harris County Courthouse, where the First and Fourteenth courts of appeal are located. It is also home to the offices for the Houston-based Business Court judges, Adrogué and Grant Dorfman.
But the Business Court, touted as a sophisticated venue to handle high-dollar, complex commercial disputes, has no permanent courtroom. And because there is no jury box in the appellate court, the plan was always to proceed with the two-week trial on the seventh floor of the Harris County Family Law Center.
The 1960s Family Law Center is dilapidated and has been previously tagged for demolition by the Harris County Commissioners Court.
Samuel Peña, chief of infrastructure services & disaster recovery for Harris County Engineering, issued a statement to The Texas Lawbook explaining that water damage at the Family Law Center was discovered early on the morning of Feb. 11, the result of a “valve failure caused by degradation.”
“The failure flowed water affecting multiple floors, requiring immediate closure to protect public safety and allow for remediation,” the statement reads. “Environmental assessments confirmed no hazardous materials were present in any affected areas.”
The building, which reopened Feb. 17, was closed to the public while the water damage was addressed. That meant all of the boxes of evidence, binders for witnesses, notes, notebooks and even snacks for the jury were also stuck in the Family Law Center for days.
The trial, intended to showcase the new court, suddenly became an exercise in crisis management. This is the behind-the-scenes story of the court’s inaugural jury trial that was filled with other unexpected firsts.
Springing into Action
Judge Adrogué told The Lawbook that, within five minutes of receiving the bailiff’s message, she called Judge Dorfman. While they were discussing how to keep the trial on schedule, they received word that some of the more conscientious jurors had already begun arriving outside the Family Law Center around 7:30 a.m.
“[Judge Dorfman] said ‘You focus on your trial, and I’m going to focus on the logistics,’” Judge Adrogué recalled.
But realizing the need to keep the locked-out jurors happy, Judge Dorfman also went to buy and drop off donuts for them to eat while a plan was formulated on how to proceed with trial.
The goal was to resume testimony at 9:30 a.m.
“I then asked one of my court counsel to send an email to all counsel that we needed to have an unexpected Zoom,” Judge Adrogué said.
Roland Garcia of Greenberg Traurig, who represented the plaintiff at trial, was driving east on Interstate 10 toward downtown when he got an “emergency call” from his office, letting him know the Family Law Center was shut down.
“I was told to get my team on the line for a call in 15 minutes,” he said. “So, I got off on the side of the road, sat in a parking lot. … I was assuming we’d have to get a new trial setting.”
Barrett Reasoner of Gibbs & Bruns, who represented one of the defendants, was also driving into downtown when he got word.
“I looked at an email — at a stop light, carefully — that was from the court, and it said can you get on a call, there’s been an issue with the courthouse,” he said. “Of course, we heard that and internally thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this day is lost. And is there going to be more than one day lost?’”
By no later than 8:15 a.m., Judge Adrogué was on the Zoom call with all parties.
“I let them know what’s transpired and to report to 201 Caroline,” she said, referencing the address of the Harris County Civil District Courthouse, “and told them that hopefully soon we’ll know the court number, what floor, but we’re not sure yet [where trial would take place.]”
Meanwhile, Judge Adrogué and Judge Dorfman reached out to Megan LaVoie and Kim Alvarado with the Office of Court Administration and to Melissa Love, the operations manager of the family and civil divisions with the Harris County District Clerk, to gameplan how to keep the trial moving forward.
Within an hour, Judge Adrogué said she was informed the litigants would have the “luxury” of using courtroom space in the Civil District Courthouse: Harris County District Judge Bruce W. Bain of the 165th said they could use his courtroom for the day.
‘One for the Record Books’
Compared to the cramped quarters the lawyers, parties and witnesses had experienced in the Family Law Center, the digs at the civil courthouse are luxurious. The 17-story building is much newer, built in the early 2000s and is outfitted with much of the technology the lawyers had to rent and hire a vendor to retrofit the Family Law Center courtroom where the trial began. Garcia noted his firm also had to rent a podium because there wasn’t one in the Family Law Center Courtroom.
Sarah Patel Pacheco of Jackson Walker, who represented another defendant in the trial, recalled that during the unexpected early-morning Zoom call, Judge Adrogué asked what the lawyers would need to proceed with the first day of evidence. For her team, she said, there was nothing critical trapped in the Family Law Center that would prevent them from proceeding with trial.
“Because of the situation in the Family Law Center, all the trial teams had agreed to a single vendor, that whole setup was through a vendor coming and wiring it up and putting up the video screens and everything in the courtroom,” she said. “And so, when we couldn’t return there, the first question was how quickly could we pivot. … We had to, just in the interest of time — can’t waste the court’s time, can’t waste the jury’s time. So, everybody recreated their evidence, their hard-copy evidence.”
“It was just a complete pivot.”
Judge Dorfman, who also serves as the administrative presiding judge of the Business Court, jokingly invoked the biblical trials of Job when asked to discuss the issues that had to be overcome during the first jury trial.
“All the logistical concerns and nightmares I’ve had, have worked out — we found chambers, we’ve found courtrooms to have hearings in,” he said. “All has worked out, and this is one more obstacle we need to surmount,” he remembered thinking at the time.
After all the wrangling and uncertainty, testimony on Feb. 11 began only about an hour behind schedule, around 10:30 a.m. Judge Adrogué said she was “most impressed” with the quick work of lawyers and their support staffs to recreate the evidence.
“It helps that we had incredibly seasoned, sophisticated, professional lawyers and law firms coming together. … Everyone was helping,” she said. “I think, quite frankly, this showed that even in the moments of true complexity — I want to say short of a crisis, because it wasn’t a crisis, but it could have been, though when someone declares a formal emergency closure of where you’re going to have a jury trial, there’s a little bit of a crisis element to it — but the Business Court, coming together, working together with Harris County and the Office of Court Administration, we can deliver.”
After a day of trial in the 165th, the parties had to pack everything up again and move to the 80th District Court, where Judge Sonya L. Aston let the parties proceed for three days. On Feb. 16, there was no trial, but all the lawyers huddled for a day-long charge conference in a room on the 17th floor, again schlepping along boxes of evidence, printers, snacks and case law.
During the charge conference, former appellate justice Bill Boyce, now with Alexander Dubose & Jefferson, who was serving as embedded appellate counsel in the trial, broke the tension.
“I said, ‘This is like practicing law in a MASH unit,’” he said.
When trial resumed the next day, it marked the fifth courtroom for jurors: The last three days of trial and deliberations took place in the 127th District Court, courtesy of Judge Denise Brown.
The lawyers involved in the trial who spoke to The Lawbook said they had never experienced a trial that involved so many courtroom changes.
“This is one for the record books,” Pacheco said. “I give great credit to Judge Adrogué and her staff. I would say they went to extraordinary measures to make this as seamless as possible given the circumstances.”
Judge Adrogué said the trial went on as scheduled because of her “co-warriors,” who worked to overcome all obstacles.
“This was not for the faint of heart, and I could not be more proud of the lawyers,” she said. “Our colleagues at the civil district courthouse, they’ve been terrific. They gave us a home. The 80th, the 165th and the 127th gave us a home, and we could not be more appreciative.”
She also took time to thank the chief justices of the First and Fourteenth, Terry Adams and Tracy Christopher, for allowing voir dire to take place in the 1910 Courthouse.
Reasoner agreed there was an unusual level of camaraderie among opposing counsel during trial.
“In trial, normally, you feel like with your own team you’re in the bunker and there’s a bonding that goes on there,” he said. “Here, among the broader group, there was a little bit of connection and empathy because we were all in this highly unusual and fluid situation. It was a little bit of ‘we’re all in this together’ kind of thing. That was a silver lining to it.”
Noting how “popular” a venue the Business Court has become for filing complex commercial disputes, Reasoner said it’s his hope “that someday the business courts will have their own places.”
Garcia echoed that sentiment, saying it’s “not sustainable to conduct business this way with such a high-level, specialized court.”
He called on lawmakers to “roll up their sleeves and figure out a home” for the Business Court.
“It’s designed to be a specialized court for high-level business disputes, along the lines of the Delaware Chancery Court, and you know, to do that, you just need a physical courthouse,” he said. “Being at the mercy of different courts and judges is not the best way to go about it. It ended up working out, but the Texas Legislature’s going to have to determine how to fund this and to begin the planning and construction as soon as possible.”
Jurors in the case ended up siding with Garcia’s client, rendering a verdict around 9:20 p.m. Friday night.
“All’s well that ends well,” he said. “But it wasn’t an easy road getting there.”