On March 6, 2025, the Texas Court of Appeals Eleventh District upheld a 2019 defense victory for Yetter Coleman’s client, Apache Corp., in a long-running oil and gas dispute in which the plaintiffs sought more than $1 billion in damages. The decision, which also awarded nearly $5 million in attorneys’ fees to Apache, ended more than 11 years of litigation that included a take-nothing judgment on the eve of trial and several appeals.
The plaintiffs sued Apache in 2014 for breach of contract and fraud in connection with a 2011 purchase-and-sale agreement. The ensuing litigation before the lower court saw Apache win several key motions that narrowed the claims and — crucially — excluded expert testimony from the plaintiffs’ damages expert. With the plaintiffs unable to assert damages, Yetter Coleman and co-counsel moved for summary judgment on the eve of trial in 2019, which the court granted.
Yetter Coleman and its talented co-counsel at Bracewell LLP continued to represent Apache through the appellate process, ultimately securing a 2023 Texas Supreme Court victory upholding both the narrowed claims and the exclusion of expert testimony. The Texas Supreme Court remanded the case to the Eleventh Court of Appeals to determine whether the plaintiffs had sufficient evidence to support the remaining claims without a damages expert. On March 6, the Court of Appeals held that “because Appellants can provide no evidence of the amount of their claimed damages, we conclude that the trial court did not err when it granted Apache’s no-evidence motion for partial summary judgment as to damages.”
Since the Court of Appeals’ decision, Apache’s adversaries have chosen not to continue their appeal further. As a result, the case is now over, resulting in a full and complete victory for Apache.
The Yetter Coleman team included partners Timothy McConn, Robert Woods, Reagan Simpson, Dori Kornfeld Goldman and senior counsel Douglas Griffith. The firm served as co-counsel with attorneys from Bracewell LLP and Lynch, Chappel & Alsup.