§ 147.085.Admissibility of Statement Relating to Computer Date Failure

An evidentiary provision protecting the conduct the chapter encourages.

Subsection (a) excludes four things from proof of liability: an offer to settle; the cure notice; evidence of furnishing or offering or promising to furnish a correction or cure; and a statement made in the process of correcting or attempting to correct a failure.

The rationale is the familiar one behind excluding subsequent remedial measures. A vendor deciding whether to warn customers and offer a fix should not have that decision used as an admission that something was wrong.

The chapter builds its whole defensive scheme around vendors doing exactly that, so admitting the evidence would have worked against its own design.

The fourth exclusion is the broadest and the most necessary. Remediation involves engineers writing candidly about what is broken, and without protection every such document would be a plaintiff’s exhibit.

Subsection (b) restores the evidence for warranty claims: furnishing or promising a cure is admissible to the extent it is evidence of a guarantee or warranty of the correction and the claim is for breach of that guarantee.

So a promise cannot be both unprovable and enforceable — a defendant who guaranteed its fix can be held to it.

Subsection (c) restores remediation statements where three things hold: the statement is false, made with knowledge that it is false, and the claimant relied on it to their detriment.

That is the exclusion refusing to shelter a lie — the protection covers candid engineering, not misrepresentation about the repair.