McAfee & Taft litigator Phil Hart won reversal of a $4.7 million judgment in an oil and gas joint operating agreement preferential right of purchase dispute by showing that the trial court had failed to properly instruct the jury. Below is an excerpt from the brief in chief.
This Court has repeatedly held that when the trial court fails to instruct the jury concerning the defenses raised to plaintiff’s claims, the jury’s verdict and the judgment based thereon will be reversed and the case remanded for a new trial.
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This proposition of law is clearly applicable here, because the trial court wholly failed to instruct the jury on the defenses as to which Damson had succeeded in adducing evidence during the course of the three day trial. Indeed, lacking any instructions from the trial court respecting Damson’s defenses, the members of the jury must have been utterly mystified as to what purpose Damson had intended to serve with the testimony it had elicited from the various witnesses it had called and the documents it had placed in evidence.