Travis County’s newest district court judge issued an order this week in a nearly 2-year-old dispute, stemming from a soured joint venture that was formed to buy and sell a luxury home in Austin, while granting and denying certain motions from both parties.
But the real news in the three-page order entered Wednesday in Brandon Becker v. UpEquity Title came in the final three paragraphs, where Travis County District Judge Cory Liu, appointed to the bench by Gov. Greg Abbott in March, took to task the Travis County central docket system.
The unique way of adjudicating cases in Bexar County and Travis County — where any district judge could preside over various pretrial hearings rather than one assigned judge taking the case from beginning to end — through the use of a presiding court or central docketing system drew the attention of Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock in his state of the judiciary address in February.
The comments came during a portion of his speech addressing the importance of having “more consistent, predictable and accurate” judges, which he said will decrease litigation as a whole.
“It’s awfully hard, though, for parties to rely on consistent and predictable rulings when they might have one judge at today’s hearing and another judge at the hearing next week, who may not know what happened at the first hearing,” the chief justice said, explaining the practice only happens in two out of the state’s 254 counties. “It is an outlier compared to nearly all the courts across the state and country that I’m familiar with. … I’ve asked the court’s advisory committee to recommend rules to eliminate this rotating docket, sometimes called the central docket.”
And on Friday, the Texas Supreme Court granted preliminary approval to rules that would effectively do away with the system used in only Bexar and Travis counties. The new rules would require cases, upon filing, be “randomly assigned to a judge authorized to preside over the case.”
“Bench exchanges are available at the originally assigned judge’s discretion, but the originally assigned judge must maintain full responsibility for the case,” the preliminary approved rule reads.
The new rules would also require that a judge “maintain responsibility for a case assigned to the judge, absent the official transfer of a case to another judge or the assignment of the case by the regional presiding judge to another judge.”
Attempts to change the system has divided the legal community, with some arguing the central docket is a more efficient way to ensure a requested hearing takes place.
Judge Liu’s critiques of the Travis County system were sharp.
“The Court observes that the deplorable management of this case is a prime example of how the lack of individual judicial responsibility for cases in the Travis County Central Docket leads to gamesmanship and wasteful litigation costs for parties,” he began. “It appears that for roughly a year now, the parties have been treading water, repeatedly litigating the same issues over and over, unable to find a judge willing to pay enough attention to this case to ensure an efficient final resolution.”
“During that time, the lesson that the parties have learned is that filing an ever-increasing number of claims and legal arguments is an effective way to overwhelm a busy district judge who has no intimate familiarity with, and no expectation of reencountering, a particular case.”
There are 351 docket entries in the case that was filed in December 2023.
Judge Liu also listed the names of all of the judges who have handled parts of the case. Including himself, 13 judges “have touched this case,” he wrote.
“I do not doubt that these distinguished jurists did their best to give this case as much attention as they could within the confines of the Travis County Central Docket. What this case needed, however, was not a few minutes or a few hours with a dozen different judges who knew little about the case. It needed one judge who was committed to achieving a just resolution,” he wrote.
“The Travis County Central Docket is often described as a ‘lawyer-driven docket.’ It is the parties who tell the courts what to pay attention to rather than the other way around. By letting the lawyers drive this case’s progression, the Travis County Central Docket allowed it to devolve into a monstrosity that would be unrecognizable in counties where judges exercise individual responsibility over cases. I welcome the Supreme Court of Texas’s recent efforts to ensure that district judges manage their own cases.”
The case number is D-1-GN-23-008775.