Last month, I wrote about how the Court shifted some of its orders releases around the time of its end-of-summer long conference. The Court issued the bulk of those petition denials on a Wednesday.

My post noted that the list resolved 70 petitions and motions. But I did not see that there was a revised opinion lurking in that Wednesday orders list. It was issued in Spectrum Gulf Coast, LLC v. City of San Antonio, acting by and through City Public Service Board, No. 24-0794, alongside the denial of a motion for rehearing.¹

Revising opinions (without revising the statistics)

The Court sometimes issues “corrected” opinions, usually when denying rehearing. My practice has been to mark the original as withdrawn, flag the new one as “corrected,” and to continue to count the opinion itself (and the voting pattern of the justices) in its original Term.

Opinions they call “revised” are more rare:

I don’t know if this is just semantic variation or if this reflects something more subtle. Either way, the Court has continued to list the original publication date as the “Dated:” line for this revised opinion, so I will as well.

I have added a new flag for “revised” opinions to the database. They will be treated the same as “corrected” opinions for my statistics (unless I learn some reason to treat them differently). But they will be described as “revised,” matching the Court’s language.

Revising how I present the orders lists

In my post, I wrote: “The ‘Latest Orders’ link at the top of this page has always gone to the most recent Friday list. That no longer seems appropriate.”

Now “Latest Orders” works differently. It usually points at the previous Friday list. But if an intervening list has a large number of orders (or a small number of grants or non-revised opinions), the “Latest Orders” button points there instead.

I’ve also added some more direct navigation buttons:

The “calendar” view is how I had always moved around; now it’s a button. There are also left and right arrows, to move to the previous and next list. And there’s a “Previous Friday List” button, for the traditionalists among us.²

And as a quality-of-life improvement (for me), my version of the orders list now elevates any case with an opinion toward the top:

So a concurrence to denial of review—or a revised opinion issued alongside a rehearing denial—is where even I can’t miss it.

When I opened an unassuming email advisory from the Court this morning, I expected the usual kind of thing you’d see on a Wednesday. Maybe a notice that a stay had been denied or an abatement lifted.

Instead, there was a full orders list. Bigger than typical even for a Friday. There are 70 cases on this Wednesday orders list, including denials of review after full merits briefing, numerous denials of review after having requested a response, and some rehearing denials.

Is this the Texas Supreme Court adopting a procedure from the US Supreme Court?

For many years, there has been a regular weekly orders list from the Texas Supreme Court on Friday mornings. Sometimes it contains just that week’s routine petition denials. But it rolls out every week, holidays excepted. (It’s still listed on the Court’s public calendar as “Orders Issued 9:00am”.)

The U.S. Supreme Court works differently. Its orders are intermittent. They tend to issue the next business day after one of the Court’s scheduled conference dates. Sometimes they pre-announce a specific date for one of those lists. Sometimes they are just issued. (The mix of patterns keeps my little Certpool website busy.)

Was this the “long conference” list?

One possibility is that today’s Wednesday orders list drop was Texas’s “long conference” list. At the SCOTUS level, the petitions build up over the summer because there is no regular weekly schedule on which they are disposed. A thousand or so end up being listed for a single conference date just before the official court term begins.

It’s a little harder to see this in the Texas system. SCOTX does not publicly disclose on the docket page when it schedules a petition to be discussed at a particular conference. Court watchers have to make some guesses about what is happening.

So was this a “long conference” list? It looks like it. SCOTX did have a long break between its scheduled conferences, with the last one on June 16 before its next conference on September 3.

A really strong indicator—and something I don’t think I’ve seen on a SCOTX orders list before—is that only one of these petitions shows that it was denied without a response. Five had full merits briefs (under the old rules). Fifty-three had a response requested before the petition was denied today. Presumably, those were up for discussion at the most recent conference.

Where are the grants?

Also notable about today’s Wednesday orders list: There were 59 petition denials and no grants.

Sometimes the SCOTUS petition grants are issued as their own orders list, separate from the denials. I’m used to seeing those be issued first.¹

Sometimes the SCOTUS petition grants wait until about a week after a tentative decision is made at conference. That is, as I understand it, so the clerks can double- and triple-check questions about preservation of error or other impediments to reaching the issue that most interested the Justices.

This SCOTX list appears to fit the first group. Last Friday’s SCOTX orders list actually had twelve grants. More remarkably for a SCOTX orders list, it had only a single petition denial (in a parental termination case).

The slightly puzzling thing is why the corresponding petition denials were issued on a Wednesday, several days later, rather than last Friday’s list or this Friday’s list.

The answer may be scotusization.²

Is the Texas Supreme Court evolving further toward SCOTUS procedures?

These past few weeks are making me wonder if there is a structural change to how the “weekly orders” work now at SCOTX.

This is a pattern you might see from SCOTUS. A small orders list just focused on grants. A larger orders list with the corresponding denials. But at SCOTUS, you’d also have the reference point of their distribution list, to see which cases had been set for a particular conference. At SCOTX, we’re just guessing.

For well over a decade, the SCOTX system of handling petitions has been described as a kind of conveyor belt, where petitions that do not receive a response request roll into being “petition denied” on the next weekly orders list. That’s not how SCOTUS does it. SCOTUS “distributes” those cases for conference and then denies them only after that conference date passes.

I would assume that SCOTX will stop short of adopting that practice. Doing so would extend the average time to dispose of a petition by weeks, after the Justices had (impliedly) decided to deny by not requesting a response.

As for me, I’ll be adjusting the dials and knobs of this website to adapt to whatever new system. The “Latest Orders” link at the top of this page has always gone to the most recent Friday list. That no longer seems appropriate. We may have to stay tuned for the Court’s next scheduled conference on September 29 to learn more.

This past week’s orders list brought the final decisions in argued cases this Term. The Court has met its self-imposed deadline to issue all of those opinions by June 30th.

There were, like last week, some very rare voting splits.

A Justice who wrote a concurrence to their own opinion

FAMILY DOLLAR STORES OF TEXAS, LLC, ARCP FDCCC1403 LLC, 7B BUILDING & DEVELOPMENT, LLC, TRIPLE C DEVELOPMENT, INC., BURKHARDT ENGINEERING COMPANY, AND M&S UTILITY CONSTRUCTION, LLC v. JLMH INVESTMENTS, LLC, No. 24-0543

Opinion of the Court

Dissenting

Concurring

Concurring

“Your eyes are not deceiving you,” I wrote last week. “Justice Busby wrote both a majority opinion and a concurrence to his own opinion…” I said that was only the second time in my time tracking the Court that a Justice had written separately to their own deciding opinion.

Now there are three. This week, Justice Busby wrote the opinion for the Court (and for a plurality on part of the opinion), while also writing a concurrence in the same case.

This concurrence breaks out certain issues that Justice Busby, Justice Lehrmann, and Justice Devine thought might “be explored in future cases,” while offering those future litigants “some points to consider.” That’s classic concurrence fare. I can see the logic of separating that from the main opinion, so there is less risk of it being interpreted as a holding of the Court.¹ It’s just unusual to see that concurrence by the author of the lead opinion.

Vinyl fans may want to consult Justice Sullivan’s concurrence for a recommendation. He opens with a song reference — not by quoting lyrics, as is traditional such as there are traditions about pop references in judicial opinions — but by saying, “it’s better to hear for yourself. … give it a listen if you can and then turn the page.”

A second (partial) plurality opinion

The same orders included a second plurality opinion.

SOREN ALDACO v. BARBARA ROSE WOOD AND THREE OAKS COUNSELING GROUP, LLC D/B/A THRIVEWORKS, No. 24-1069

Opinion of the Court

Concurring

Justice Sullivan wrote for the Court (“unanimous”) for most of the opinion, but was joined only by three other Justices for Part II.B of the opinion.

Nine minus four is five who did not join. Three of those were silent about why, not writing or joining any separate opinion on the question.

Justice Young, joined by Justice Bland, did write a concurrence to express “why I am a touch more doubtful about the views expressed in Part II.B (which is not part of the opinion of the Court).”

A majority of the Court’s members joined some kind of “statement regarding” the denial of a long-pending mandamus petition

In the past few years, a few Justices have been issuing a “statement regarding” one of the Court’s orders instead of formally noting a concurrence or dissent.

IN RE STEVEN HOTZE M.D., No. 24-1042

Statement

Statement

This case brought two separate “statements regarding,” joined by a total of five Justices.

The statement by Justice Hawkins notes that the Court “has never set out a particular standard a trial court must consider when deciding whether to stay a civil proceeding in light of a parallel criminal proceeding.” It then lays out two “impediments” to doing so in this case: (1) that the relator Hotze is no longer a criminal defendant and the person who is (Aguirre) is not a relator and (2) that it does not appear the stay in the civil case would be needed because the civil case is lagging behind the criminal process.

Justice Devine wrote a separate statement that proposes a substantive standard for when trial courts should stay a civil proceeding in light of an ongoing criminal case. He went on to “nevertheless agree with and join my colleague’s statement, which explains why the mandamus petition should be denied at this time. … The original proceeding’s current posture makes the petition a less-than-ideal vehicle for establishing such a standard.”

Final term stats are still to come

If you want to see a tentative version of the voting and opinion stats for this Term, you can reach those in the sidebar. They aren’t yet final, and the totals or percentages you see today might shift as I do cross-checks and tighten up the code that generates those live tables on the website.²

This week’s orders list brought eight more grants under the new petition rules. The Court has set these for argument in the November and December sittings.

Two very unusual voting splits

We are nearing the Court’s self-imposed June deadline to clear its docket of argued cases. This week, that crunch brought us two very unusual voting splits.¹

A per curiam with a three-Justice dissent.

IN THE INTEREST OF J.D.H., A CHILD, No. 25-0588

Per Curiam

Dissenting

In In re J.D.H., a child, No. 25-0588, the Court issued a per curiam in a parental-termination case. The court of appeals had dismissed the appeal as untimely; the Court through a per curiam reversed and remanded “for a hearing on whether the petitioner’s counsel was ineffective in filing a late notice of appeal.”

But three Justices joined a signed dissent to the per curiam. Justice Sullivan, joined by Justices Young and Hawkins, would have held that the appellate courts lacked jurisdiction over a direct appeal that was as untimely as this one, no matter how sympathetic.

A majority author who wrote a concurrence to their own opinion.

IN RE DR. ROBERT TAFEL, ET AL., No. 24-1062

Opinion of the Court

Concurring

Concurring

Concurring

Your eyes are not deceiving you. Justice Busby wrote both a majority opinion and a concurrence to his own opinion in this Medicaid-fraud case.

That doesn’t happen every day. During my time tracking the Court, the only similar example is Justice Willett concurring to his own opinion in In re Bexar County Criminal District Attorney's Office, No. 05-0613.

Here are the slides:

View the slides Open the PDF

I tried to cover both parallel tracks going on at the Court, with partial-term numbers about cases filed under the old petition rules and the new rules alike. Those precise, partial-term numbers are aging fast. But my speculative guesses about the future remain un-disproven just yet.

The tl;dr is: I’ve added a new feature to the website that lets you quickly see which Justices have written opinions for each of the Court’s argument sittings this term. My version lets you see the authors of majority opinions or, if you’d like, to also see who has written majorities or dissents for a particular sitting:

This is wired into my docket-tracking data, so the numbers should update with each new opinion release. If you click on the date of the argument sitting, you will also reach an “argument sitting” detail page listing what cases were heard, their outcomes, and the time to decide each of them.

If this is catnip for you, welcome and enjoy. If you’re wondering who would ever want such a chart, then you can either read on or just continue blissfully with your day.

Reasoning by process-of-elimination

Guessing who will write a specific opinion is a pastime of U.S. Supreme Court watchers. Near the end of a term, you’ll sometimes see them spell this out, step by step, pointing out that a particular justice has not (or already has) written an opinion for an argument sitting that has a high-profile case.¹ A chart to make that easier — showing who has and has not written for each argument sitting — appears to be the only stats chart that is live-updated on the current SCOTUSblog website.²

This reasoning begins with an observation: the U.S. Supreme Court tends to assign an equal number of majority opinions to each justice, for each argument sitting. Despite the highly strategic way that authorship of majority opinions is handled in that Court (with the chief or most senior justice who favors the majority outcome making each assignment), the outcome across all the cases smooths out to be consistent with a norm that each justice should write an equal number of majority opinions.

That seems to be honored often enough to make this a useful assumption. That said, it’s certainly not a strict rule. And my intuition is that the time in the Court’s term that the math has been reduced to its simplest form — when the number of remaining cases is very small — is precisely when the internal pressures that might break this norm are most intense. (The end of term is when the most fragmented and contentious cases already tend to cluster.)

What’s a little different in Texas

The Texas Supreme Court also follows a norm that each justice will write a similar number of majority opinions. That’s observable in the opinion totals for each term. And as a matter of process, we have been told that the Texas justices randomly draw for their opinion assignments before argument. That kind of random draw would very naturally tend to distribute those assignments (roughly but not perfectly) across the argument sittings.³

You can see that this pattern holds, but not perfectly, by looking at some charts for recent terms.

One wrinkle with Texas’s random-draw approach is that the justice who draws the initial assignment may find themselves in dissent from the start.⁴ With that in mind, my chart also lets you quickly see which justices have authored either a majority or a dissent for the sitting. The number of majority opinions is printed in black; the number of dissents is printed in red.

My website has been tracking these new petitions (more on that below), so I’ve been watching for the first grant. My hope had been that the first grants might answer some questions about how the internal process might be working (and, more selfishly, give me some material for my CLE talk in June).

Here is what I’ve been tracking, and where today’s grants fit in.

The two tracks of cases moving through the Court

The defining feature of the Court’s new petition system is that it would allow these grant-or-deny decisions to be made off the petition and initial response, much like the U.S. Supreme Court handles its own petitions.¹

But the Court is not starting from a blank slate. It begins with a full docket of its regular cases, accumulated under the old system.

For now, and the foreseeable future, the Texas Supreme Court will therefore be working on two tracks internally. Every case that was already on its docket before this year continues along under the old system. But the petitions filed since January 1st are under a brand-new set of rules.² As I write on May 1st, there are already far more total petitions pending in the Court under its new rules than still remain under the old rules.³ But, as you’d also expect, the cases under the old rules tend to be those that received some earlier attention from the Court, including many in which the Court ordered full merits briefing.

Keeping tabs on which petitions might be up at the next internal conference

The new rules came with the possibility of faster up-or-down decisions on petitions.

To this point, the Court has been denying a steady flow of petitions under the new rules. But it has not yet granted any for review. The Court is requesting responses to petitions; those are being filed. Excluding parental-termination cases, the Court has requested a response to more than 50 regular petitions. Before today, none of those had been granted or denied.⁴

This week the Court made its first grants, and first denials, of petitions under its new rules

The orders list showed three petition grants (with the two San Patricio County Appraisal District cases consolidated for oral argument):

The Dallas County case is about the Texas Tort Claims Act. The two petitions brought by San Patricio County Appraisal District are pitched as being about “whether the State, via its interior local governments, will benefit from very significant revenues that result from the massive exportation of oil, NGL and LNG…”⁵

At this week’s conference, the Court also chose (for the first time under the new rules) to deny some of the petitions for which it had requested a response.⁶

Questions for the future (for me, at least)

The timing of grants relative to oral argument

The petitions granted today were set for oral argument October 6.

That kind of gap has always been typical for “grants” made during this spring period, when the Court has already finished hearing arguments for this term and is filling next term’s calendar.

What is worth keeping an eye on is how this gap fits — and may become the norm — for all “grants” under the new petition rules. According to the “Supreme Court Procedures Summary,” the Court’s hope is to leave enough time for each side to get an extension, in the regular course, and for all briefing to be complete at least 2 weeks before argument:

It looks like the Court exactly hit that target today.

By my math, the regular briefing schedule (with each side taking an extension on their opening brief) would see the reply brief filed on September 21, 2026 — two weeks before argument.

Do we know anything (yet) about when petitions will be listed for conference?

Another timing issue I’m wondering about is when petitions filed under these new rules will be put on the Court’s internal conference agenda for this grant-or-deny decision.

The old IOPs (at least at one time) suggested that petitions were set for the first conference thirty days after the response was filed, leaving time for a reply to be filed in the normal course.

The newly issued “Supreme Court Procedures Summary” is more circumspect. It says that a petition goes onto the conference agenda “after” the deadline for a reply. But it does not say how many days after, or measured from when.

Before today, I had guessed that the usual timing might be 30 days after a response was filed. With that in mind, I recently added an experimental column to the page on my site that tracks petitions that have a response on file for the “Initial Conference.” That column, today at least, shows which of the Court’s publicly listed conference dates is the first that falls at least 30 days after the response.

Most of today’s “denials” were, in fact, petitions that fit that schedule. But today’s “grants” actually came in some cases where the response was filed less than 30 days before the conference. It’s possible that is because the Court chose some petitions for accelerated treatment (perhaps in an effort to leave enough time before an October 6 argument date). It’s very possible that the Court just hasn’t settled into a reliable pattern yet. Or that there’s no reliable pattern to be found.

I’ll be adjusting the knobs and dials of this “conference date” column, as we learn more. In the meantime, you can use that page on my website to see which petitions may be up for conference.

… a mind’s inner workings are often opaque and its contents not easily partitioned.

A disqualification case with some cautions for appellate lawyers

IN RE ADEEL ZAIDI, A.K. CHAGLA AND PRESTIGE CONSULTING D/B/A TURNAROUND MANAGEMENT GROUP, No. 24-0245

Opinion of the Court

Earlier this month, the Texas Supreme Court issued an attorney-disqualification opinion. The court’s guidance — and its strict rule of disqualification — actually applies to any law firm big enough to employ non-lawyer support staff.

This opinion might make you read Texas e-filing notices a little more carefully. (And the fact pattern here might make you wish that your firm’s lawyers all knew how to make e-filings themselves, rather than delegating that task to staff.)

What led this law firm to be disqualified

Lawsuits can tend to linger. This case began in 2009, and at that time the plaintiff had two law firms. One of those firms employed a legal assistant who, quite naturally, came into contact with confidential materials. In 2011, that legal assistant moved to a new law firm.

The case continued to a bench trial. The defendant’s side hired an appellate lawyer, who ultimately won a reversal and remand for a new trial in 2016. Around that time, the defendant’s appellate lawyer joined a larger law firm — which was, unluckily, the same firm that had hired this legal assistant.

At that point, there was a conflict. The legal assistant had, five years after starting a new job, suddenly become “side-switching legal staff.” On this record, the conflict did become more than theoretical. The opinion tells us that, from 2017 to 2022, the legal assistant did some work on this case “on thirteen occasions,” including some “limited” secretarial services when a lawyer’s regular assistant was unavailable. Crucially to how things played out here, the legal assistant also helped with the mechanics of making two e-filings for this case in 2022. Those standard Texas e-filing notices listed the legal assistant’s name as the one who made the filing on the attorney’s behalf.

In January 2023, when looking back through some of the e-filings from 2022, lawyers on the plaintiff’s side recognized the name of this legal assistant. They filed a motion to disqualify in March 2023.

The trial court granted disqualification. When doing so, the trial court rejected a waiver argument based on the idea that too much time had passed between the 2022 e-filing notices and the March 2023 motion to disqualify. The court of appeals upheld the disqualification, with a one-sentence mandamus denial. The Texas Supreme Court set the mandamus petition for oral argument, which was heard in October. The Court ultimately upheld the disqualification.

“a mind’s inner workings are often opaque and its contents not easily partitioned”

The Court called the legal rule here “longstanding” and “bright-line.” “[S]ide-switching legal staff requires disqualification unless minimal prophylactic measures were undertaken to safeguard prior client confidences from the risk of inadvertent disclosure.” The test has two prongs. It requires “both an instruction and other reasonable steps” to reduce the risk of the side-switching legal staff becoming involved in the matter. (page 20)

The defendants argued in part that “an admonishment would have had little effect when the legal assistant was hired because the conflict did not arise until years later.” The Court disagreed. Its reason was less practical than aspirational. “In our experience, paralegals, secretaries, and other legal assistants aiding the bar are, by and large, commendably diligent, respectful, and ethical. … We are confident most legal staff, when admonished, will faithfully comply to the best of their abilities and not work on conflicted matters, including those that arise years later.” (page 12)

The Court defended having a rigid bright-line rule about admonitions by pointing to the limits of human memory. Once years have passed, it may be difficult to know what information a staff member may have been exposed to. In contrast to mishandled paper documents — for which it might be theoretically possible to discern precisely what information was involved — “a mind’s inner workings are often opaque and its contents not easily partitioned.” (page 19)

“forgetful, inattentive, or even potentially rogue nonlawyers”

The test has two necessary steps. There must be “both an instruction and other reasonable steps” to prevent cross-contamination. (page 20) Without proof of that initial step of the “instruction” or admonition, disqualification is required. No “reasonable steps” can salvage the situation.

In a footnote, the Court explains that, in combination, these two prongs are meant to:

reduce the risk of disclosure to an acceptable level by addressing two types of nonlawyers. Generally speaking, the first prong is directed at ethical nonlawyers who will comply with instructions while the fact-intensive second prong is geared toward forgetful, inattentive, or even potentially rogue nonlawyers. … However, an ethical nonlawyer may be forgetful or careless at times — such is the lot of human nature — and other reasonable steps provide guardrails to support an instruction. And even a rogue nonlawyer may be more likely to abide if admonished. Thus, both prongs are necessary, but neither is sufficient on its own to satisfy the test. (page 20 note 63)

E-filing notices are notices

The easy practical takeaway is: Admonish early and often. Admonish newly hired staff. Admonish staff, again, when your firm brings on new counsel who carry their own bundle of conflicts. Send the memo; save the email somewhere safe. Unless you can establish that you met the first prong with an admonition (at some relevant time), the reasonableness of your other protocols will not matter.

The other takeaway may be that e-filing notices are notices, of a sort.

This conflict surfaced because of some e-filing notices. But those same notices almost — and on a different record might have — unraveled the disqualification argument by waiver.

The defendant argued that these notices should have put the other side on notice. “Under the defendants’ theory, the plaintiffs were on notice, as a matter of law, nearly a year earlier when the case documents with the e-filing notifications listing the legal assistant’s name were filed in March 2022. If so, an unexplained one-year delay before filing the disqualification motion would be unquestionably dilatory.” (page 22)

The Court held this mandamus record was not strong enough to establish waiver as a matter of law. And that standard of review was pivotal to the Court’s explanation of its decision. In general, “[a] disputed fact issue on intention precludes mandamus relief, as ‘we may not make factual determinations in mandamus proceedings.’” (page 23) The explanations offered here were reasonable enough, at least as filtered through the standard of review. That said, it’s easy to imagine slightly different facts — such as if the side-switching staff member had worked for the other side’s current lawyers, rather than a firm that withdrew more than a decade ago — where a trial court might easily find that e-filing notices like these do start the clock for waiver.

For a number of years, the Texas Supreme Court published a set of “internal operating procedures” (IOPs) on its website, with a detailed look at the internal process. The most recent update to that document (of which I am aware) was in 2018.¹

Having published that document did not stop the Court from experimenting. As members of the Court had new ideas, or prevailed on their colleagues to revisit older ideas, the actual practice at the Court would change in ways not reflected in the IOPs. (Eventually, the Court removed that 2018 document from its website.)

My own CLE presentations would typically have a “show and tell” section, with unusual procedural things I had seen in the SCOTX docket. Members of the Court would sometimes be asked about those at panel discussions, even at the same conference. The result was a kind of oral folk knowledge about the Court’s practices. At least once, something was so unusual that it broke through to the legal press even before a conference. That was the April 2022 decision by the Court to grant a petition for review based on the petition alone, before requesting merits briefs.²

That turned out to foreshadow the new petition rules, effective January 2026.³

An official “summary” of the new rules

When the Court issued its new petition rules, it attached a memo. That struck me as very unusual; I’m not aware of the Court previously using its rule-making process to issue this kind of memo to the bar.

In many ways, this seems to be a bullet-pointed version of the old Internal Operating Procedures. It’s the prose of a memo, not the poetry of a rule. The memo does discuss the new petition rules to which it was attached; what it says about those should be read with interest. But it goes much farther. It puts those rules in a larger context, talking about internal court procedures like what number of justices are needed to vote for different outcomes, and the Court’s expectations about how motions to extend time will work under the new system.

Here’s the memo. The annotations in yellow are mine (not the Court’s), and they highlight some of the changes that may be of particular interest to Texas appellate lawyers.

This “summary” doesn’t freeze the Court’s process in place.

We don’t know how durable this guidance will be. I doubt the Court knows the answer to that question yet, either. The memo is simultaneously the most and least formal guidance yet issued by the Court. It’s part of the formal rule-making process, baked into an administrative order signed by all nine justices. But that order says that the “summary document … is not a part of the rules.” Misc. Docket No. 25-9104 ¶5 (Dec. 23, 2025) And the memo itself says it is for our benefit, as members of the public and bar, but was “not intended to bind the Court.” (see ¶1).

But for now, it’s a remarkably clear statement of how the Court expects its new petition rules to work.

The big news, really, is that the Texas Supreme Court dramatically changed its petition process in January.

Under the old system, the Court’s discretionary review proceeded in two steps. First, the parties would file a petition seeking to persaude the Court to show some interest. Then the Court would request full merits briefing from both sides. Only after those months of briefing would the Court decide whether to grant review or not.

The new process in Texas is loosely modeled on the petition for certiorari process at the U.S. Supreme Court. But it’s also uniquely different. Each time I read through the redline of the new petition rules, I see some new detail that I’d like to explore. I’ll write about some of those later.

My court-tracking website is being updated to fit this new petition process

The big news, for me, is that I’ve just updated my docket-tracking website to follow cases as they move through the new process.

The easiest place to see the change is the “Snapshot of the Docket” chart, which has been updated to reflect the different paths that petitions can take through the discretionary-review process — under the new rules and the old.

By looking across, you can see where the Court stands in this transition. The new petitions are still early in their journey, and the older petitions (those filed before January 1st) have either been denied or are moving forward. On this chart, each of these groups is clickable, so you can drill down to see the specific cases I’m tracking at each stage.

As of today, the Court has not just yet announced any grants of review for these new petitions.¹ And it has also not yet taken advantage of its option to still request merits briefing, such as if it is considering a case for a possible per curiam. That’s just a snapshot in time. The up-to-date version of that chart lives here.

The Court did hold an internal conference this week, so it’s possible we will see the first set of those grant decisions as soon as this Friday.²