Independent Contractors and Open-and-Obvious Dangers: JMI Contractors, LLC v. Medellin

A worker hired as an independent contractor was seriously hurt on a construction site because of a hazard that was plain to see. Can the general contractor be held responsible?

The Supreme Court of Texas took up that question this summer in JMI Contractors, LLC v. Medellin, 738 S.W.3d 775 (Tex. 2026).

What happened. JMI was the general contractor on an apartment project in San Antonio. It hired a roofing company, which brought in Jose Medellin — an experienced roofer working as an independent contractor — to help. Medellin and other workers were pulling a roll of roofing membrane across the roof. He lost track of the edge, stepped off, and fell about thirty feet. A jury found JMI responsible on two theories and awarded more than $3.3 million in damages plus $1 million in punitive damages. The court of appeals in San Antonio upheld the verdict. The Supreme Court reversed it and ruled that Medellin takes nothing. Id. at 778–80.

Two kinds of claims. To follow the decision, it helps to know that Texas treats injuries on someone else’s property as one of two kinds of claims, and the difference matters.

A negligent-activity claim says you were hurt by something the other side was doing at the time — a worker swinging a beam into you, for example.

A premises-liability claim says you were hurt by a condition of the property — a hole, a wet floor, an unguarded edge — that the owner or whoever controlled the site failed to fix or warn you about.

The Court has said for years that a single injury is one or the other, not both. United Scaffolding, Inc. v. Levine, 537 S.W.3d 463, 471 (Tex. 2017). Each claim has its own rules, and some defenses apply to one but not the other.

This was a premises case. The Court decided Medellin’s injury came from a condition — the unguarded roof edge — not from anything JMI was actively doing. The instruction to “pull the roll” came from another independent contractor, not from a JMI employee. And although the jury found JMI had “some control” over fall-protection measures on the site, the Court said that wasn’t enough. For a general contractor to be liable for a contractor’s work, there has to be a specific finding that it controlled the details of the work that caused the injury. Not putting a safety measure in place, the Court said, “is not actual control.” 738 S.W.3d at 784, 787–88.

The open-and-obvious rule. Once the claim was a premises claim, the key question became whether the danger was obvious. Under Texas law, a property owner generally doesn’t have to warn about or fix a hazard that’s open and obvious — the idea being that if you can see the danger, you already have the information a warning would give you. Austin v. Kroger Tex., L.P., 465 S.W.3d 193, 203 (Tex. 2015).

There’s a long-recognized exception. If you have to go through the obvious danger to use the property for its intended purpose, and you can’t reasonably avoid it, the owner may still have a duty. That’s called the “necessary-use” exception, and it goes back to a 1978 case about a woman who had to walk down an unlit stairway to leave a building. Parker v. Highland Park, Inc., 565 S.W.2d 512 (Tex. 1978). The court of appeals had applied that exception to Medellin: he had to be on the roof to do the job.

The exception doesn’t apply to independent contractors. That’s the new part. The Court held that someone hired as an independent contractor can’t use the necessary-use exception. Its reasoning: a contractor is expected to size up the job and account for obvious hazards in deciding how to do it; contractors are often hired precisely to deal with dangerous conditions; they bring their own know-how and equipment, manage their own safety, and can turn down a job they think is unsafe. The woman on the stairway in Parker was none of those things. The Court had already held in Austin v. Kroger that an employee sent to clean up a hazard couldn’t use the exception against the employer, and it saw no reason to give contractors — who “pick and choose their work” — a break that employees don’t get. 738 S.W.3d at 792–93.

Applied to Medellin, that ended the case. He had about three years of roofing experience, testified that he was “keenly aware” of the risk of working at a roof edge without fall protection, brought his own equipment to the site, and hadn’t brought a harness — though other workers said they routinely did. Id. at 793.

In the Court’s words: “an independent contractor may not avail himself of the necessary-use exception to pursue a premises-liability claim.” Id. at 792. The decision was unanimous. Justice Busby joined it and added a short concurrence making one point: a general contractor can still owe a separate duty if it actually takes control of how a contractor does the work — that duty comes from the control, not from owning or occupying the site, and the Court’s opinion leaves it in place. Id. at 793–94 (Busby, J., concurring).

What it appears to mean. For an injured independent contractor, the decision seems to narrow the path to recovery against a general contractor or property owner. If the hazard was obvious, a premises claim won’t work, and the necessary-use exception is no longer a way around that. What’s left, on the Court’s framing, is a negligent-activity claim built on proof that the defendant actually controlled the details of the work — not just that it had general authority over site safety — or a premises claim based on a hazard that wasn’t obvious. The opinion doesn’t say whether the result would be different for a less experienced worker, or for one who had been told that fall protection was in place.

See also our post on shipper liability for motor-carrier accidents, the first in this series on recent injury decisions.