The Texas Business Court Performance Report

Four findings

The Texas Business Court has been deciding cases for two years, and in that time nobody has published the procedural numbers a litigant actually asks about: how long a motion sits, how often a removal survives, what a plea to the jurisdiction is worth. This report computes them from all 131 published opinions. Four results carry most of the weight.

One. Where an opinion recites the filing date of the motion it decides, the median time from filing to written ruling is 63 days. The middle half of those 48 rulings landed between 38 and 104 days. The fastest came in 2 days, the slowest in 291.

Two. Of the 35 removal fights the court has resolved with a remand grant or denial in a published opinion, remand was granted in 24, which is 68.6 percent. A contested removal has held roughly three times in ten.

Three. The five divisions are doing different jobs. Rulings on threshold questions, the ones that decide whether a case belongs in the court at all, are 81.8 percent of coded output in both the Third and Fourth Divisions (9 of 11 in each), against 43.6 percent in the First (17 of 39) and 45.9 percent in the Eleventh (17 of 37).

Four. Through the report’s cutoff, sixteen mandamus petitions arising from Business Court cases had been decided by the Fifteenth Court of Appeals. Exactly one has been conditionally granted, a rate of 6.2 percent.

Every figure on this page states its base, and the full dataset is downloadable below under CC BY 4.0. Source for all statistics unless otherwise noted: the Kraus Law coded corpus of 131 published Texas Business Court opinions, verified October 1, 2026.

The corpus: 131 opinions, verified

The court opened on September 1, 2024 and issued its first published opinion on October 30, 2024. Through September 28, 2026 it has published 131: eight in the 2024 citation series, 55 in 2025, and 68 in 2026, with no gaps and no duplicates. All 131 are coded in the dataset behind this report, and 124 were read and coded from the official PDFs at txcourts.gov. The remaining seven rest on secondary records, and each dataset row states which. A one-line holding for every opinion is in the downloadable dataset below; the curated highlights, the complete Eighth Division record plus the statewide opinions that shaped Chapter 25A practice, are maintained in the Texas Business Court cases tracker.

The 2024 series had to be reconstructed

The court’s own online opinions list did not carry the eight opinions of the 2024 series when this edition was compiled (it now does), and neither did the SMU feed this report was checked against. We reconstructed the series independently from the court’s published PDFs and secondary indexes and verified each opinion’s caption, division and date. A count built from the feed alone, or from the list as it stood in August 2026, starts eight short.

One reissue, and why the feed count is not the corpus count

On August 24, 2026 the SMU feed’s own metadata declared 123 opinions, the same number this corpus then held. The two sets were not the same 123. The feed omits the 2024 series, and the court has reissued at least one opinion in corrected form: 2025 Tex. Bus. 49, Crain v. Northern, exists on txcourts.gov as a corrected file, and a pipeline that carries an original and its corrected reissue as separate records runs high by one. A feed count and a corpus count can land near the same number for different reasons, so this report counts opinions once each, by citation, and reconciles the total against the court’s PDFs rather than against anyone’s metadata.

How the clock is measured

Days to ruling is computed only where the opinion itself recites the filing date of the motion it decides. Forty-eight of the 131 do. We did not estimate the other 83 from docket records, because we did not read docket records: the docket systems sit behind access restrictions that do not permit automated collection, and this report uses nothing it could not verify. The 48 are not a random sample. The Eighth Division accounts for 19 of them, so the statewide speed figures lean toward Fort Worth practice, and every table below prints its n so you can weigh it.

Whose numbers these are

The coding is ours. Matter type, disposition, threshold versus merits, removal posture and the day counts were assigned by this office, and the full dataset is published below so the coding can be checked. The statewide index we verified coverage against is the Texas Business Court Codex maintained by the SMU Corporate Governance Initiative, which also publishes a public JSON feed. The Codex is the reference for descriptive coverage of the court, and this report does not compete with it. It computes the procedural measures the Codex does not: speed, grant rates, and outcomes on appeal. We used the feed as a map, never as authority; every attribution here traces to a primary source or is flagged in the dataset.

The same coded corpus is also the source for a sector-specific figure elsewhere on the site: The Alberta–Texas Energy Corridor computes the docket's energy-matter share by matching captions against a named list of known energy matters, with its own methodology disclosed inline. The same corpus also anchors a standing annual publication: the Texas Business Court Annual Review selects ten opinions a year by disclosed qualitative judgment and five more by a computed, reproducible criterion run against this corpus.

Output: two big dockets and three small ones

Dallas and Houston produce most of the court’s written work. The First and Eleventh Divisions account for 82 of the 131 published opinions, 62.6 percent. The Eighth Division in Fort Worth is the clear third at 24, and the Third and Fourth Divisions have published 12 and 13.

Opinions published through September 28, 2026, counted by caption division. Source: Kraus Law coded corpus, n=131.

The pace is rising. The court published 8 opinions in the last quarter of 2024, 55 across 2025, and 68 in 2026 by September 28. May 2026 alone produced 16 and July 2026 produced 14, the two heaviest months on record.

Output by judge

Ten judges sit on the court, two per active division. Authored counts credit the signing judge wherever the opinion was issued, because cross-division assignment is routine: the busiest docket, Houston’s Eleventh, has drawn judges from the Third, Fourth and Eighth to keep pace. Biographies, appointment dates and division assignments for all ten are on the judges and divisions page.

n=131. Twelve of the 131 opinions print no judge name in the signature block; those rows are attributed to the judge who holds the issuing docket, so per-judge counts carry a small margin of attribution error at the edges.

The cross-sitting shows up in the numbers. Judge Andrews has authored 15 opinions while her home Third Division has issued 12 under its own caption, and the two Fort Worth judges together have authored 34 against 24 Eighth Division captions. Researching a judge by division caption alone misses part of the record.

Speed: how long a ruling takes

Across the 48 opinions that recite the decided motion’s filing date, the median time from filing to written ruling is 63 days. The middle half runs 38 to 104 days. The extremes are real: one ruling issued 2 days after the motion was filed, one took 291.

Medians of days from recited motion filing date to written ruling. Middle half is the 25th to 75th percentile, printed as computed; quartiles are not computed where n=3. Only opinions reciting the motion’s filing date are counted; nothing is estimated.

Read the division rows as description, not ranking. At n=3 and n=5, the Third and Fourth Division medians are three and five data points, and a single unusual motion moves them.

Speed by judge

Six judges have at least three opinions reciting the decided motion’s filing date. Together they account for 43 of the 48.

Judges with fewer than three recited dates are not reported. The per-judge samples mix different motion types, so the medians are not like-for-like comparisons.

What these numbers cannot capture is chambers practice, which the two Fort Worth judges publish in detail: both set trial within 13 months of filing, both require a proposed order in Word with every motion, and both spell out hearing and submission mechanics. We maintain a practice page for each, keyed to the current published procedures: Judge Bullard (revised April 2, 2026) and Judge Stagner (revised April 1, 2026).

Speed by matter type

The clearest pattern in the timing data is by subject. Threshold fights move fast. Merits work waits.

These five categories cover 43 of the 48 timed rulings; the rest fall in categories with fewer than three observations and are not reported. Quartiles are not computed where n=3.

The practical version: a remand fight is typically resolved inside seven weeks. A summary judgment motion typically waits three and a half months, and a quarter of them waited more than nine. Plan briefing calendars accordingly.

Remand and removal: the fight over the door

The most heavily litigated gatekeeping question in the court’s first two years is whether a removed case gets to stay. Thirty-five removal fights have been resolved in a published opinion with a remand grant or denial. Remand was granted in 24, which is 68.6 percent, and denied in 11. Two more opinions resolved removal questions in other postures. The fights cluster on a few recurring points: whether the suit was commenced before the court’s September 1, 2024 effective date, whether the amount in controversy clears the threshold, whether a qualified transaction exists at all, and whether the removal was timely.

Two things follow. First, a defendant weighing removal should price in a roughly seven-in-ten historical failure rate when the plaintiff contests jurisdiction, remembering that published opinions are the contested cases; removals nobody fights do not generate opinions and are not counted here. Second, the decision is effectively final: as covered in the appellate section below, the Fifteenth Court has held there is no interlocutory appeal from a Business Court remand order. The full jurisdictional test, element by element, is on the Texas Business Court jurisdiction page.

What each motion is worth: grant rates by type

The table counts every published opinion by the motion it decides. The rate counts a grant or partial grant as a success, over the base of grants, partial grants and denials; dispositions that resolve a motion some other way (rendered, sustained, dismissed) sit outside the base. Where the base is under 5, the rate is suppressed and only counts are shown.

Remaining categories, one opinion each: trial and final judgment, temporary injunction, TCPA. Six opinions are coded other (4 rendered, 1 sustained, 1 other). Total 131.

Three caveats belong next to this table, stated plainly.

These are rates among published opinions, not among motions filed. The court decides many motions without a written opinion, and under Judge Stagner’s published requirements in the Eighth Division a written opinion is discretionary and must be requested before the issue is decided. Published rulings skew toward the motions a judge thought worth writing about.

The summary judgment number is softer than it looks. Of the 34 successes, 22 are partial grants, meaning the motion also failed in part. A cleaner reading: only 3 of 37 summary judgment motions that reached a grant-or-deny disposition were denied outright, and 12 were granted outright.

The jurisdictional number runs the other way. A plea to the jurisdiction or similar threshold challenge succeeded in whole or part in 5 of 14, 35.7 percent. Most pleas fail, usually because pleaded facts satisfied section 25A.004. The exception worth knowing: a plea aimed at a claim the statute excludes outright, such as legal malpractice, succeeds even where supplemental jurisdiction would otherwise sweep the claim in, because the exclusions in section 25A.004 reach supplemental jurisdiction too.

Threshold work versus merits work, by division

Coding each opinion as threshold (does this case belong here) or merits (who wins on the substance) shows the divisions at different stages of the same lifecycle.

Share computed over opinions cleanly coded threshold or merits; mixed and not-applicable rows are excluded from the base. Source: Kraus Law coded corpus, n=131.

In Austin and San Antonio, four out of five written rulings still decide whether the court has the case at all. In Dallas and Houston, the majority of written output is now merits work: contract construction, fiduciary duty, summary judgment. Fort Worth sits in between. The divisions with the largest dockets have simply moved further through the gatekeeping phase, and a party filing in the First or Eleventh today should expect its written rulings to look more like a commercial docket and less like a jurisdictional seminar.

The appellate layer: the Fifteenth Court of Appeals

Appeals and mandamus petitions from the Business Court go to the Fifteenth Court of Appeals in Austin. Through the coded cutoff of July 14, 2026, 26 Business Court matters have been decided there: 16 original mandamus proceedings, 8 interlocutory appeals and 2 direct appeals. Each one, with its holding, is indexed on the Fifteenth Court of Appeals tracker.

n=26 outcome-coded decisions in Business Court matters. A verification sweep completed August 24, 2026 found two further decisions, dated August 4 and August 6, 2026, both interlocutory appeals dismissed after final judgments below made them moot. Neither is a mandamus ruling and neither changes a rate in this table; both are indexed on the tracker.

The shape of that table is the finding. Of 26 decisions, exactly three disturbed anything the Business Court did: one vacatur on the HB 40 effective-date question, one partial reversal of a temporary injunction, and one conditional mandamus grant, In re Frank Jackson, decided July 14, 2026, holding in substance that attorney immunity covered the advice at issue and directing the Business Court to vacate its denial of a Rule 91a motion. Everything else was denied, dismissed or abandoned.

The consequence for removal strategy

What this report does not measure

Filing counts and caseload analytics. The SMU Corporate Governance Initiative’s Codex tracks filings and cases statewide with twice-daily ingestion. We do not duplicate that work, and for descriptive caseload questions the Codex is where to look.

Time to disposition. Measuring how long a whole case takes requires docket records, and the relevant docket systems restrict automated access. This report measures only what published opinions recite, which is why the speed figures cover motions, not cases, and only the 48 opinions that state the operative dates.

Outcome prediction. Published opinions are a selected sample: the court writes when it chooses to, and contested, close questions are overrepresented. Nothing here estimates the odds of any particular motion in any particular case, and a rate with n=8 under it should be read as a record, not a forecast.

Each row carries the citation, cause number, division, judge, date, memorandum flag, matter type, disposition, threshold-or-merits coding, removal posture, the motion filing date where recited, the day count, a one-line paraphrased holding, the coding source, and a link to the opinion.

Sources and method

Primary: the Texas Business Court published opinions list and the opinion PDFs it links; Tex. Gov’t Code ch. 25A. Fifteenth Court decisions were verified against published opinions and public case indexes, and are maintained with holdings on our Fifteenth Court tracker.

Statewide index: the Texas Business Court Codex of the SMU Corporate Governance Initiative and its public JSON feed, used for coverage checking and credited with thanks. The coding, the statistics and any errors in them are ours alone.

First edition, published August 24, 2026; updated October 1, 2026. Business Court corpus current through 2026 Tex. Bus. 68, issued September 28, 2026, checked against the court’s opinions list on October 1, 2026. Fifteenth Court coverage verified through August 24, 2026. Next edition planned for early 2027. Free to cite with attribution.

Common questions

How fast will the Texas Business Court rule on my motion?

Across the 48 published opinions that recite the decided motion’s filing date, the median is 63 days from filing to written ruling, and the middle half runs 38 to 104 days. It varies by subject: remand fights resolve at a median of 47.5 days (n=16), summary judgment at a median of 104 (n=9).

How often does a motion to remand succeed?

In 24 of the 35 removal fights resolved with a grant or denial in a published opinion through September 28, 2026, which is 68.6 percent. Published opinions are the contested cases, so the rate describes fights, not all removals.

Is it worth removing a case to the Business Court?

The record says a contested removal has survived 11 times in 35, and that a remand order cannot be appealed, so the decision is made once. Whether your case clears section 25A.004 in the first place is a separate question with its own moving parts; the full test is on the jurisdiction page.

Which division rules fastest?

On the current samples, no division can honestly be ranked. The Fourth’s median is 38 days but rests on 5 observations; the Eighth and Eleventh sit at 63 (n=19 and n=14); the First at 81 (n=7); the Third at 103 (n=3). At these sizes the differences are within the noise.

Can I appeal a Business Court remand ruling?

Not by interlocutory appeal. The Fifteenth Court has held in substance that a remand order is neither a final judgment nor covered by any interlocutory appeal statute. Mandamus is the remaining route, and it was granted once in 16 petitions through August 24, 2026.

The numbers say how fast and how often. They do not say whether your case belongs there.