Justice Eva Guzman, writing for the Court, began by observing that the issue presented was one of first impression and that the analysis would be guided by “established negligence and proximate-cause principles.”

The Court carefully explored the difference between a concurring cause and a superseding cause. The former “concurs with the continuing and cooperating original negligence in working the injury, leaving the causal connection between the defendant’s negligence and the plaintiff’s harm intact,” while the latter “destroys any causal connection between the defendant’s negligence and the plaintiff’s harm, precluding the plaintiff from establishing the defendant’s negligence as a proximate cause.”

The Court emphasized that foreseeability is the key factor in distinguishing between a concurring and a superseding cause.

Based on these general principles, the Supreme Court announced a new legal axiom in Texas: “When a judicial error intervenes between an attorney’s negligence and the plaintiff’s injury, the error can constitute a new and independent cause that relieves the attorney of liability. To break the causal connection between an attorney’s negligence and the plaintiff’s harm, the judicial error must not be reasonably foreseeable.”

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