Emailed back and forth with a dealership on the cost of a vehicle and the amount they would give me for trade-in. Once we found numbers we agreed on the dealership said they would send the papers for me to sign. No money has exchanged hands and nothing other than emails are in writing. If I decide to back out now before signing the papers can I be sued? The dealership is in TX.
The question is whether a contract came into existence, which turns on whether both parties' objective conduct evidences a mutual intent to be bound on all material elements of the agreement. It's quite possible to form a binding contract whose terms have only been agreed upon orally, with no written documentation.
However, I agree with Mr. Erikson that the fact that the dealership is still trying to get your signature on a written agreement is, all by itself, pretty strong evidence that the parties did not mutually intend to be bound to a purely oral agreement, but rather that their intention to be bound was conditional upon reducing the entire agreement to a written form signed by both sides.
Another important question is whether either side has already partially performed its commitments, or otherwise changed its position to its potential detriment, in reliance on the other side's apparent willingness to be bound by a purely oral agreement. If, for example, the dealer arranged to bring a particular car from far away to satisfy your requirements, and if the dealer told you it was doing that, then those circumstances would be useful for the dealer in trying to hold you to the deal.
As for email: The general tendency is for courts to treat them just like snail-mail letters, which means that they may indeed be offered as powerful evidence to show what the parties intended. It's very common for both offer and acceptance to be communicated by email these days for many types of contract. If the parties so intended, they could certainly enter into a binding contract for the sale of a car entirely through email communications. But in the context of negotiations to buy a car from a dealer -- especially if there is financing involved -- it's probably vastly more common for the parties to be using email just for negotiations, and for both sides to reserve their demonstration of an intention to be bound for the official pen-and-ink signing of one or more pre-printed and carefully crafted written contracts containing all the terms and conditions of the transaction (typically including lots of boilerplate designed mostly to protect the dealer); and of course, to complete performance, the seller is going to HAVE to execute written documents sufficient to accomplish the transfer of the written car title by TxDOT.
Determining whether, and at what point in the negotiations, the parties have evidenced a mutual intention to be bound can be surprisingly difficult. That's why law schools uniformly make Contracts a two-semester course, and it's altogether common for the final exam to focus on a contract-formation hypothetical. To give you confident advice about your chances if the dealer were to try to sue you to hold you to the deal, any lawyer would need to review whatever documentation (including unsigned drafts) was exchanged, and to quiz you at length on the details of the oral discussions. A lawyer can also help you assess the practical likelihood that you'd be sued and, of course, could serve as your advocate in further discussions with the dealer.
If you're talking about a used car where the intended sales price was $1800, then it would not likely be economical for the dealer to sue you. If you're talking about some high-end luxury car costing tens of thousands of dollars, though, you might have enough of a risk to justify paying a lawyer to consult privately with you.
