At Gov. Greg Abbott’s urging and as part of Texas’s economic development effort, in May 2023 the Texas Legislature created the Texas Business Court. The court is a statewide trial court handling high-dollar, complex business disputes. Its mission is to provide a fair, efficient, economical and predictable forum for parties to resolve their business disputes. Those cases include business-to-business matters with $10 million or more in controversy and internal-governance-related disputes with at least $5 million in controversy for private companies and no monetary threshold for public companies.
The court addresses the state’s need for a specialized court to handle complex business cases arising in the state’s dynamic business community and robust economy. For example, Texas has the country’s second largest population and is one of its fastest growing states. In size order, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth and Austin are in the top 12 largest cities in America.
Texas is the world’s eighth largest economy and will soon pass France for seventh place.
Texas follows only California as home to Fortune 500 companies (57) and is tied with New York for second place (52). Illinois is the next closest (32). Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Texas include ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, AT&T, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Texas Instruments, Halliburton and Waste Management.
Dallas is regarded as the country’s second most important financial center, and demographers predict that the DFW Metroplex will be the country’s largest by 2030. Airports Council International (ACI) World frequently names DFW Airport the best large airport in North America, and the FAA listed DFW the third busiest airport in the country in 2024.
Houston is a world energy leader, and the Port of Houston is the largest U.S. port in terms of foreign waterborne tonnage and fifteenth in the world. The Port of Corpus Christi is the third-largest port in the United States in total waterborne tonnage, the largest crude oil export gateway in the nation, the second in the U.S. in LNG exports and the third-largest gateway in the world for crude oil exports. Houston is also home to the world’s largest medical complex.
Austin and Dallas are large, growing telecom and tech hubs. Leading technology companies in Texas include Tesla, Dell Computers and Hewlett Packard.
On Feb. 12, the NYSE Group President, Lynn Martin, stated, “As the state with the largest number of NYSE listings, representing over $3.7 trillion in market value for our community, Texas is a market leader in fostering a pro-business atmosphere.”
The Dallas-based Texas Stock Exchange is expected to begin operations later this year or early next year. In response, the NYSE on March 31 opened its NYSE Texas exchange for its first listing. Later this year, the Nasdaq will be opening an exchange in Dallas. The Nasdaq currently lists more than 200 Texas domiciled companies with a collective market cap approaching $2 trillion. Goldman Sachs is moving five thousand employees to Dallas this year.
It may be that no American court outside the United States Supreme Court has been more talked about over the last year than the Texas Business Court. Commentators have discussed and debated the court at many continuing legal education and business fora. Numerous newspaper and business media stories, academic articles and law firm newsletters have trumpeted its arrival, developments and how the court will help Texas grow its stature as the state with the best business climate. Commentators also discuss whether the court will help Texas displace Delaware as the preferred state for business formation. A Google search reveals approximately 100 articles or YouTube videos discussing the court.
The court’s judges have collectively made more than 200 presentations introducing the court to thousands of lawyers and business leaders from throughout Texas, the country and even the world.
Complex business cases consume large quantities of judicial resources and often require four or more years to go to trial in large metropolitan areas. They often take weeks, if not months, to try. Thus, the business court removes congestion from overcrowded district courts that maintain more than two thousand cases on their docket at any given time. It will also allow its cases to go to trial years faster than if they were in a district court.
The court has five operating divisions centered in the state’s largest population centers of Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio. There are two judges sitting in each division. Those divisions cover more than eighty percent of the state’s population.
Gov. Abbott appointed the court’s ten judges in June 2024. Each judge has decades of experience handling a wide variety of complex business cases and an established record of public service and community leadership. Four of the judges have prior judicial experience. The Texas Senate unanimously confirmed all ten appointments.
Working with the Texas Office of Court Administration and the Texas Facilities Commission, the court secured and opened new chambers in each division. Those chambers include space in the historic Harris County Courthouse that the judges share with the First and Fourteenth Courts of Appeals, the Texas A&M University School of Law campus, the William P. Clements Jr. State Office Building and commercial offices in Dallas, McKinney and San Antonio.
The Fort Worth Division has an informal partnership with the Texas A&M University School of Law where the court operates at the law school campus. This arrangement allows students to observe court proceedings and the judges to interact with students, faculty and staff daily.
The Dallas Division has a similar partnership with the Robert H. Dedman SMU School of Law and is conducting dispositive motion hearings in law school classrooms. Law students are encouraged to observe hearings.
And the Austin Division recently arranged to hold hearings at the University of Texas Law School from time to time.
The court opened its doors for business on Sept. 1, 2024, and received its first filing at 12:03 in the morning that same day. Since then, it has been off to a roaring start. As of this writing, more than 105 cases have been filed in the court, of which more than 75 are actively pending. Not surprisingly, roughly 50 percent of all cases have been filed in the Houston Division, 25 percent in the Dallas Division and the rest divided among the remaining divisions.
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Before the court began operating, the Texas Supreme Court adopted new rules of civil procedure governing practice in the business court: Texas Rules of Civil Procedure 352 through 359. Those rules cover topics like specific business court pleading requirements, removal procedures, transfers to the court, a dismissal’s effect on an action or claim, remote proceedings and the court’s duty to write opinions explaining its dispositive rulings and other issues of importance to the state’s jurisprudence.
The court’s written opinions are critical to its mission to develop a consistent body of jurisprudence regarding business law and governance issues. And all intermediate appeals from those decisions go exclusively to the simultaneously created Texas Fifteenth Court of Appeals ensuring consistency on appeal as well. Further appeals go to the Texas Supreme Court.
Because the court is to speak solo voce, its opinions are similar to appellate opinions. So, like intermediate Texas appellate courts, the business court designates its opinions as “Opinions” or “Memorandum Opinions.”
“Opinions” represent decisions that typically involve questions of first impression regarding the Business and Organizations Code, other statutes applicable to business transactions, Government Code sections applicable to the court or other issues important to the state’s jurisprudence. “Memorandum Opinions” are for cases involving established legal principles or procedural questions.
The distinctions are important, because Westlaw publishes “Opinions” in the S.W.3d but publishes “Memorandum Opinions” only online without the S.W.3d designation. Lexis also publishes the court’s opinions. The court is working with other platforms for publication as well.
The court adopted a “medium neutral” system for identifying its cases. For example, each opinion begins with an opinion number in this format: [Year] Tex. Bus. [Sequential Number] (e.g., 2025 Tex. Bus. 1). This method makes it easy to find a case regardless of the platform one searches on. And each paragraph is numbered, which facilitates pinpoint citing across multiple platforms.
The judges adopted procedures to facilitate expedited resolution of the court’s cases. First, they early on adopted Local Business Court Rules. Then, judges or divisions created individual chambers rules, guidelines and procedural forms for parties to use. The court and some judges have since published revised rules. All rules and other aids are published on the court’s website.
The court has retained a full complement of court managers and staff lawyers in each operating division. Each judge has a court manager, who serves as a court administrator and clerk, and a full-time staff lawyer to help with analysis, research, writing and other activities supporting court operations.
The court has a central staff lawyer who assists with opinion reviews, coordination and consistency, while also handling many other administrative tasks.
There is a central clerk’s office, located in Austin, which has a full-time clerk. This clerk handles all court filings and other records with the deputy clerk. All filings are electronic.
Filings are exceeding projections, and the pace is accelerating as parties and practitioners learn more about the court and are seeing the results it is producing. More than 20 cases were filed in March 2025 alone.
Roughly more than half of all filings have involved business-to-business contract breach cases, and more than one-third have been internal shareholder, LLC member or partnership governance disputes. Filings have included trade secrets cases as well.
The court has released more than twenty opinions explaining its decisions. Given the court’s newness, most of those opinions have addressed preliminary issues such as requests for interim injunctive relief and personal and subject matter jurisdiction challenges, in particular concerning the court’s ability to hear cases removed from state district court.
However, the court recently released a summary judgment opinion regarding the relationship between partners’ rights and responsibilities under their partnership agreement and the Business Organizations Code. The opinion also discusses a controlling partner’s drag-along rights over minority partners’ objections, a question of first impression in Texas.
Like the appellate courts, the business court is developing methods for the public to sign up for case alerts, notice of released opinions and orders, and case summaries.
The Texas Business Court is still in its infancy, but it is well on its way to successfully serving Texas and all Texans by providing a fair, efficient, economical and predictable forum for resolving business disputes.
Bill Whitehill is a Texas Business Court Judge in the Dallas Division.