Yesterday, the Texas Supreme Court approved a new local rule for the Third Court (covering Austin) that provides a framework for electronic district court records. The documents in the appellate record can now be submitted as scanned, word-searchable PDFs.

The order is here.

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Last week, the Austin Bar Association sponsored “An Evening with the Supreme Court of Texas,” featuring a panel discussion in which six of the Justices participated.

The event was captured on video and is available here. Todd Smith also published a writeup of the event.

The Court discussed some of the hot new topics of appellate [...]

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Beginning today, Texas Supreme Court litigants are required to file electronic versions of their briefs along with their paper copies.

This is not a true e-filing system because it does not replace paper briefs. Rather, the Texas Supreme Court is requiring that PDFs supplement the paper briefs. This will let the Court more easily [...]

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On this blog, I’ve gotten very used to commenting on the dueling arguments between the authors of dissenting and majority opinions, with the occasional new perspective offered by a concurrence.

But I’m now out of practice.

It’s been five months since any Justice authored a dissent or a concurrence to a merits decision of the Texas Supreme [...]

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One trap for unwary litigants new to the Texas Supreme Court is the limited authority it has over interlocutory appeals.1

A recent law review article asks if there is a new, implicit category of cases that the Texas Supreme Court can hear in early interlocutory appeals — cases in which the lower court order conflicts with [...]

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For a few years, the Texas Supreme Court has made limited requests for PDF versions of briefs. The request was made only for those cases that were chosen for full merits briefing, after making it past the petition stage. Those PDFs proved useful to the Court, and the same PDFs were also made [...]

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The “green book” — the Texas Rules of Form style guide for Texas citations — is up for revision, and its editors at the Texas Law Review want your input.

Comments should be sent to Rex Mann at the law review. His contact information is here. Comments are requested by October 31, 2009.

Some ideas [...]

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Now that the Texas Supreme Court’s 2009 season is over,1 it’s time to start counting up the opinions to see which Justices were most prolific.

I’ve compiled the Texas Supreme Court opinion statistics in a form that lets you drill down to see the individual cases and opinions.2

Individual Awards

Justice Johnson wrote the largest number of signed [...]

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I came across a tweet talking about unpublished opinions in Texas and whether practitioners, to be safe, have to use Westlaw and Lexis to search for those opinions.

It cites a legal research blog post titled “Practioners Beware… Research on Westlaw / Lexis is a Necessity in Texas?”, which in turn discusses a St. Mary’s Law [...]

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In Monday’s paper, Adam Liptak of the New York Times wrote about some recent studies about predicting the outcome of a U.S. Supreme Court case based on oral argument.

The lesson? The side asked the most questions tends to lose.

Ongoing studies hope to learn whether the tone of the questions helps to predict with even [...]

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Today’s “Practice Before the Texas Supreme Court” CLE

It looks like a good one. I will, unfortunately, not be there because of a conflicting engagement. I’d love to hear about it later (or contemporaneously, if anyone there will be doing the trendy Twitter thing).

At least I’m not alone with having conflicts. At least [...]

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I posted earlier about the Texas Supreme Court’s relatively light slate of oral arguments, ultimately speculating the Court might still hear 75 cases if it filled up all its available slots.

That hypothetical did not come to pass. It seems that the Court has canceled its late April argument sitting, its last of the spring, [...]

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