Chapter 19-3 Texas "Fair Notice" Standard for Pleadings

• Jurisdiction: United States

19-3 Texas "Fair Notice" Standard for Pleadings

Tex. R. Civ. P. 47(a) requires the plaintiff to provide "a short statement of the cause of action sufficient to give fair notice of the claim involved." Tex. R. Civ. P. 45(b) clarifies this requirement by stating "[t]hat an allegation be evidentiary or be of legal conclusion shall not be grounds for an objection when fair notice to the opponent is given by the allegations as a whole."

The Texas "fair notice" standard for pleading "looks to whether the opposing party can ascertain from the pleading the nature and basic issues of the controversy and what testimony will be relevant."¹⁷ In the absence of special exceptions, if the factual allegations provide the opponent with notice of the intended claim so that the opponent is enabled to prepare a defense, the sufficiency of the pleading will be upheld despite a failure to actually label the cause of action or plead all elements of the cause of action.¹⁸ Likewise, at the opposite extreme, if the pleading states one or more elements of the claim in the form of legal conclusions rather than pleading factual allegations, the pleading is nevertheless sufficient (at least in the absence of special exception) if it gives "fair notice to the defendant of the basis of [the] complaint."¹⁹ Both of these situations are consistent with the statement in Tex. R. Civ. P. 45(b) that pleadings will not be objectionable for being "evidentiary" or "of legal conclusion" when "fair notice" is "given by the allegations as a whole."

Special exceptions are available to point out pleading defects and omissions,²⁰ but they are not intended as a substitute for the discovery tools provided by the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure.²¹ "When evaluating special exceptions, the trial court must accept as true all material factual allegations and all factual statements reasonably inferred from the allegations in the pleadings being challenged. Consistent with the trial court's discretion, pleadings are to be construed liberally. [The court is] to ignore any factual propositions outside the petition that tend to contradict the petition. The rule on special exceptions does not require that a plaintiff set out in his pleadings the evidence upon which he relies to establish his asserted cause of action. It is not a valid objection to complain that the pleading does not set out enough factual details, if fair notice of the claim is given. Similarly, complaining that a petition does not state a cause of...