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September 12, 2020 Dear All: I hope all of you took the opportunity to watch the State Bar’s Advanced Civil Appellate Seminar this last week, and the Appellate Law 101 Course which preceded it.  Really, really good speakers, papers, and topics.  If you did not have a chance to catch it this last week, watch […]

September 5, 2020 Dear All: Welcome to a new (fiscal) year for the Texas appellate courts!  Typically, the first couple of weeks of the new fiscal year do not see a lot of error preservation decisions, but not so this year.  I suspect that’s related to a smaller number of appellate filings for last year

August 29, 2020 Hidey Ho, Fellow Campers!  Only about 2 days left in this fiscal year for the Texas appellate courts, and they have kicked out the error preservation stops, so to speak.  It is interesting–while I did not specifically check the numbers from the last few years, it seems like this year followed a

August 22, 2020 Dear All: Well, the courts continue churning out opinions to move as many cases as they can prior to the end of the fiscal year, and as usual this time of year the opinions contain their fair share of error preservation decisions: Table of Contents The Dallas Court has reminded us of

August 15, 2020 Dear All: We continue our steady march toward the end of the courts’ fiscal year, and they continue to churn out opinions.  Most of this week’s error preservation decisions involved parties failing to raise their complaints in the trial court, but a few decisions did have interesting aspects to them: Table of

August 8, 2020 Dear All: The courts of appeals continue their steady march to the end of their fiscal year, and we see the normal slight uptick in the number of error preservation opinions. Table of Contents When you argue a basis to support your TCPA motion at the hearing on the motion, you have

August 1, 2020 Hi, Buckaroos!  We are within sight of the end of the courts’ fiscal year, and we can expect their opinion production to ramp up over the next month.  And I’ve found that sometimes that ramped up production coincides with interesting error preservation decisions. Table of Contents Rarely, an issue arises about whether

July 25, 2020 Dear All: Well, I guess we’ve returned to what more or less passes for normal these days.  I hope everyone remains safe and well. Table of Contents An objection that a discovery request is overbroad is sufficiently specific to preserve that complaint Discovery The complaint you make on appeal must be the

Dear Friends: First, Great News! According to recent Tweets by Black Hawthorne, the websites of almost all Texas courts of appeals have started replicating, meaning that those websites now reflect all documents filed in the various cases. Various items still need updating by hand, but the various courts have started working on those, as well.

July 11, 2020 Dear Folks: I didn’t bother you with an update last week because the only error preservation cases I ran across involved parties failing to raise complaints in the trial court. This week provided a couple of more meaty morsels for your stew. Table of Contents We have an extensive discussion of the