When Texas opened its Business Court on September 1, 2024, skeptics questioned whether a new specialized forum would attract enough cases to matter. Nearly two years in, the numbers have answered yes. The Business Court took 185 cases in its first fiscal year, a pace that compares favorably with the early years of statewide business courts in Georgia, Wyoming, and North Carolina, and filings in the opening months of fiscal year 2026 ran 38 percent above the prior year’s average.[1] I recently examined how the Business Court fits into Texas’s broader effort to rival Delaware. This article looks at the court itself, such as how it is built, what it can hear, how cases reach it, and what its first two years reveal about litigating there.
How the Court Is Built
The Business Court is a single statewide trial court divided into 11 geographic divisions, five of them operational: Dallas (First Division), Austin (Third Division), San Antonio (Fourth Division), Fort Worth (Eighth Division), and Houston (Eleventh Division).[2] Each operating division has two judges, appointed by the Governor for two-year terms, and every judge must bring at least ten years of experience in complex business litigation, business transactional work, or civil judicial service. One clerk’s office in Austin handles filings statewide, and judges may sit for one another across divisions to equalize dockets, a mechanism that moved 22 cases in the first year, nearly all out of Houston.
Two features set the court apart from an ordinary district court. Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 360 requires the Business Court to issue written opinions in specified circumstances and permits one with any order.[3] The Business Court issued forty-two written opinions in its first year.[4] That is how Texas intends to build the predictable body of corporate case law that took Delaware decades to accumulate. Appeals, meanwhile, are channeled to the Fifteenth Court of Appeals, which, as the Texas Supreme Court confirmed in Kelley v. Homminga and Devon Energy Production Co. v. Oliver, holds exclusive jurisdiction over Business Court appeals but no general jurisdiction over ordinary civil appeals.[5]
What the Court Can Hear
Chapter 25A of the Government Code defines the Business Court’s jurisdiction. The largest category, invoked in 145 of the first year’s 185 filings, covers corporate governance, such as derivative proceedings, actions regarding an organization’s governance, governing documents, or internal affairs, securities claims, and disputes involving controlling persons and managerial officials.[6] A second covers commercial disputes arising from “qualified transactions.” House Bill 40, which went into effect on September 1, 2025, cut that amount-in-controversy threshold from $10 million to $5 million and added jurisdiction over intellectual property and trade-secret disputes and certain arbitration proceedings.[7] Less widely appreciated is that the statute gives effect to party choice. For an action arising out of a contract or commercial transaction clearing the $5 million threshold, the parties may agree in the contract or afterward that the Business Court has jurisdiction.[8] That makes the Business Court a drafting consideration as much as a litigation one.
Paths to the Court
Three paths lead into the Business Court: an original petition, removal from a district court or county court at law, and judge-initiated transfer (though no case arrived by this avenue in the first year). Out of the cases that the Business Court handled during its first year, 43 percent of the cases arrived by removal.[9] An agreed notice of removal may be filed at any time, but a contested removal must come within 30 days of the later of service or the date the removing party discovered, or reasonably should have discovered, facts establishing jurisdiction.[10] Those deadlines have teeth. The court remanded for untimely removal in Sun Metals Group v. Yu, rejecting the argument that supplemental claims should be excluded in fixing when a case first became removable because Chapter 25A does not permit “supplemental claims,”[11] and again in DrinkPAK, LLC v. PRIII/Crow Building C, LP, where it looked past the pleadings to the underlying lease and pre-suit correspondence to determine that there was “no reasonable doubt” that the jurisdictional facts necessary to confer the Business Court with jurisdiction were “discovered, or should have [been] discovered” well before the defendants filed their removal notice to the Business Court.[12]
The removal fight runs in the other direction too. In In re ColossusBets Ltd., the Fifteenth Court of Appeals took up an issue of first impression – whether a plaintiff may amend its pleadings after removal to strip the Business Court of jurisdiction. The Fifteenth Court of Appeals held yes, a party may amend his pleadings to remove facts giving rise to the Business Court’s jurisdiction, but at a permanent price.[13] A plaintiff who expressly disclaims the allegations, theories or relief supporting jurisdiction waives them irrevocably.[14] The court also confirmed that the Business Court may revisit its own removal rulings and that jurisdiction is not fixed as of the moment of removal.[15] For defendants, a removal resting on a single jurisdictional hook is vulnerable if the plaintiff is willing to abandon it. Remand is no idle threat generally: 19 cases, roughly 1 in 10 filings, were remanded in the first year.[16]
The First Trials
Powers v. Berry, tried in Houston in February 2026, ran eight days over ownership of a planned crude oil export terminal near Corpus Christi. At least 10 of 12 jurors agreed on each answer in a 20-question charge, finding a valid agreement conveying a one-fifth interest and awarding $2.4 million in attorney’s fees.[17] A week later the Dallas division empaneled its own first jury in Quintero v. Urban Infraconstruction, but the case never reached deliberations, given that the court directed a verdict for the defense on the trial’s second day, the plaintiffs’ damages evidence having proved fundamentally insufficient.[18]
The lessons cut two ways. Juries are available and willing to decide complex, high-dollar commercial disputes, which is a structural difference from Delaware’s Court of Chancery, where there are none, and the judges will not hesitate to end a case mid-trial when the proof fails. Speed is the other headline. The Business Court resolved 85 percent of the disposed cases in the first year within 180 days, and the Business Court’s administrative rules set internal targets for prompt rulings on matters under advisement.[19]
Strategic Considerations
Two distinct drafting tools are now available. Senate Bill 29 amended the Business Organizations Code to let Texas entities designate the Business Court as the exclusive forum for “internal entity claims” in their governing documents and to include binding jury trial waivers for those claims, enforceable even against equity holders who never signed the document.[20] Separately, and for ordinary commercial agreements rather than governing documents, parties to a qualifying transaction may consent by contract to the Business Court’s jurisdiction. The two mechanisms cover different ground and conflating them in a form agreement is an easy way to draft a clause that does not do what it appears to do.
For litigators, the analysis starts with geography. Only 5 of 11 divisions are operating, and a case whose county of proper venue lies outside an operating division cannot be removed or transferred to the Business Court at all, so venue should be mapped before any removal strategy is built. The dormant divisions, however, are not dead. House Bill 40 repealed the sunset provisions that would have abolished them on September 1, 2026.[21] The removal clock deserves equal attention, since it can begin running not at service but when jurisdictional facts reasonably come to light.
There are considerations on the other side of the ledger, though the most immediate one has just eased. Business Court judges serve two-year terms rather than the fixed elected terms of Texas district judges, which makes the composition of the bench a live variable in long-running cases. However, Governor Abbott reappointed all 10 sitting judges on July 29, 2026 to new terms beginning September 1, and continuity now appears to be the working expectation.[22] The body of precedent, while growing quickly, remains young. And the Business Court’s constitutional foundation has yet to be directly tested. In Brown v. Exxon Mobil Corp., a former executive argued that a statewide trial court staffed by appointed judges cannot be squared with the Texas Constitution’s districting and election requirements. The Business Court never reached the question, remanding in May 2026 on statutory grounds.[23] However, the Texas Supreme Court has already turned aside a similar attack on the Fifteenth Court of Appeals.[24]
While none of this is disqualifying, it does belong in a candid forum analysis before a business commits its dispute, or its contracts, to the new court.
Pastore LLC represents businesses, financial institutions, and executives in complex commercial and securities litigation and counsels clients on forum-selection and governance questions, and has attorneys admitted in, among other jurisdictions, Connecticut, New York, and Texas.
[1] Annual Report FY 2025, Bus. Ct. Tex. at 7–8, 12–13, https://www.txcourts.gov/media/1461667/bcot-ar-fy-25_.pdf (last visited Aug. 10, 2026).
[2] Tex. Gov’t Code § 25A.003; Business Court, Tex. Jud. Branch, https://www.txcourts.gov/businesscourt/ (last visited Aug. 10, 2026).
[3] Tex. R. Civ. P. 360.
[4] Annual Report FY 2025, supra note 1, at 6.
[5] Kelley v. Homminga, 706 S.W.3d 829, 834 (Tex. 2025) (per curiam).
[6] Tex. Gov’t Code § 25A.004(b); Annual Report FY 2025, supra note 1, at 7.
[7] Tex. H.B. 40, 89th Leg., R.S. (amending Tex. Gov’t Code §§ 25A.001(14), 25A.004).
[8] Tex. Gov’t Code § 25A.004(d)(3).
[9] Annual Report FY 2025, supra note 1, at 8.
[10] Tex. Gov’t Code § 25A.006(d)–(g); Tex. R. Civ. P. 355.
[11] Sun Metals Group, LLC v. Yu, No. 25-BC01A-0050, 2026 WL 37435, at *2 (Tex. Bus. Ct. Jan. 6, 2026).
[12] DrinkPAK, LLC v. PRIII/Crow Bldg. C, LP, No. 26-BC08A-0007, 2026 WL 1347499, at *2–3 (Tex. Bus. Ct. May 14, 2026).
[13] In re ColossusBets Ltd., 731 S.W.3d 366, 370–71 (Tex. App. 15th Dist. 2026).
[14] Id.
[15] Id.
[16] Annual Report FY 2025, supra note 1, at 10.
[17] Powers v. Berry, Cause No. 24-BC11A-0025 (Tex. Bus. Ct., 11th Div.); see also Ryan Autullo, Texas Jurors Reach Verdict in First Business Court Jury Trial, Bloomberg Law (Feb. 23, 2026), https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/texas-jurors-reach-verdict-in-first-business-court-jury-trial.
[18] Quintero v. Urban Infraconstruction LLC, Cause No. 25-BC01A-0022 (Tex. Bus. Ct., 1st Div.).
[19] Annual Report FY 2025, supra note 1, at 11; see generally Local Rules of Admin. for the Tex. Bus. Ct. (rev. July 1, 2026), https://www.txcourts.gov/businesscourt/practice-before-the-court/ (last visited Aug. 10, 2026).
[20] Tex. Bus. Orgs. Code §§ 2.115(b)(2), 2.116.
[21] Tex. Gov’t Code § 25A.006(e); H.B. 40, supra note 7 (repealing the divisional sunset provisions in Tex. Gov’t Code § 25A.003).
[22] Governor Abbott Reappoints Ten Judges To Texas Business Court, Off. Tex. Governor (July 29, 2026), https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-reappoints-ten-judges-to-texas-business-court; Tex. Gov’t Code § 25A.009 (two-year terms; reappointment permitted).
[23] Brown v. Exxon Mobil Corp., No. 25-BC11B-0099, 2026 WL 1531165, at *12-13 (Tex. Bus. Ct. May 29, 2026).
[24] See In re Dallas Cnty., 697 S.W.3d 142, 165 (Tex. 2024).