AUSTIN - The Texas Supreme Court held on Friday that a trial court erred in compelling disclosure of confidential drug-test records of UPS employees who are non-parties in a wrongful death lawsuit against the company.
According to the high court’s opinion, on Sept. 21, 2017, a UPS driver operating out of the Irving facility was involved in a multi-vehicle collision that resulted in the death of Nathan Dean Clark. Post-accident drug testing for UPS’s employee came back positive for THC. UPS disputes whether any impairment was a causative factor in the accident.
Clark’s mother sued UPS and the driver, alleging that the driver knowingly drove UPS trucks while under the influence of drugs and that UPS failed to properly drug test.
The opinion states that the plaintiff, in order to establish a pattern and practice of failing to adequately drug test at the Irving facility over a period of years, served discovery requests seeking the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of “all Commercial Vehicle drivers who drove Commercial Vehicles” for UPS who were “dispatched out of the (UPS) facility in Irving, Texas” during the 11-year period preceding the accident and “all documentation of all alcohol, drug, and/or controlled-substance tests” for each of those drivers—including pre-employment, random, reasonable-suspicion, periodic, and post-accident testing—without any time restriction.
Court records show the trial court overruled UPS’s objections, which argued the requests were overbroad, sought irrelevant information, sought information protected from disclosure under federal law, and violated constitutional and common-law privacy rights of uninvolved, nonparty drivers.
The Supreme Court conditionally granted UPS mandamus relief “because the discovery requests are overbroad in seeking irrelevant information about uninvolved UPS drivers,” the opinion states.
“We thus hold that … the trial court erred in compelling disclosure of confidential drug-test records of nonparty UPS employees who have no alleged involvement in the accident that caused Clark’s death,” the opinion states. “Accordingly … we conditionally grant UPS’s petition for writ of mandamus and direct the trial court to vacate the portion of the September 30, 2020 discovery order compelling production of information and records pertaining to drug-and-alcohol test results for current and former UPS drivers who are not parties to the litigation and who were not involved in the September 2017 accident.
“The writ will issue only if the trial court does not comply.”
Case No. 20-0827