Beaumont Court: Access Doctrine Does Not Apply to Vicarious Liability Claims
The Beaumont Court of Appeals has concluded that the access doctrine is a creature of workers’ compensation law and that it does not apply to extend an employer’s potential liability in a suit by a non-employee using a theory of vicarious liability.
The case is OCI Beaumont v. Barajas, No. 09-16-00406-CV, May 18, 2017. There, Barajas was hit by a truck while walking through a parking lot located adjacent to OCI Beaumont LLC’s plant. The truck was owned and driven by Obodo, a salaried mechanical engineer employed by OCI. Barajas filed a suit against Obodo and OCI seeking to recover for the injuries she suffered when Obodo struck her with his truck. Barajas alleged that the collision occurred on OCI’s premises and that Obodo was acting in the course and scope of his employment as OCI’s employee when the collision occurred. The trial court agreed that a fact question existed whether Obodo was acting in the course and scope of his employment, utilizing the access doctrine.
Barajas took an interlocutory appeal to the Beaumont Court of Appeals, where the appellate court wrote that the “access doctrine” in workers’ compensation cases is a limited exception to the more general rule recognizing that compensation benefits do not extend to injuries incurred by employees going to and from work. Tex. Comp. Ins. Co. v. Matthews, 519 S.W.2d 630, 631 (Tex. 1974). Under the “access doctrine,” employees injured while going to or from work, if on routes designated by their employers and at locations near where they work, may receive compensation benefits “where such access route or area is so closely related to the employer’s premises as to be fairly treated as a part of the premises.”
The Court of Appeals held that the cases that the plaintiff relied upon were all workers’ compensation cases involving a statutory scheme “which is generally liberally construed to allow the employee to receive workers’ compensation benefits.” Relying upon an earlier, unpublished opinion, the court wrote that “the rules applied to determine whether a worker is entitled to statutory workers’ compensation benefits are not intended to apply to matters other than cases involving claims for workers’ compensation benefits.”
Instead, the court reasoned that Texas courts have consistently held that the employer is not vicariously liable for the torts 16 committed by employees when their connection to their job shows they were merely commuting to work. Because Obodo was engaged in a commute to work – albeit the final portion of that commute – and because Barajas was not seeking to recover workers’ compensation benefits from OCI (she couldn’t; she was not an OCI employee), the court reversed the trial court’s judgment denying OCI’s motion as to Barajas’s vicarious liability claim, and remanded the case to the trial court for proceedings consistent with the court’s opinion.
FOLIO
