Don Cruse

IOPs vs. “inferred” operating procedures

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.

  1. In June 2018, I co-presented a CLE program with the clerk of the court. We covered some of those new rules, as they existed at the time: 2018 CLE ↩

  2. The grant of review in Daniel K. Christ and Nicole D. Salinas v. Texas Department of Transportation, No. 21-0728 and some excerpts from that article were in my June 2022 presentation to the UT appellate conference (beginning at slide 10) ↩

  3. This blog post focuses on the memo attached to those rules. The redline of the new petition rules is here. ↩