Texas Business Law · Reference

The Texas Business Court, Eighth Division

Fort Worth. Two judges, eighteen counties, and twenty-four published opinions since November 2024. This is all of them, with what each one held. Ten never reached the merits, which tells a North Texas company most of what it needs to know before deciding whether to move a case here.

By Charles R. Kraus

Partner, Scale LLP

Two judges, eighteen counties

The Eighth Division of the Texas Business Court sits in Fort Worth. It covers Archer, Clay, Cooke, Denton, Eastland, Erath, Hood, Jack, Johnson, Montague, Palo Pinto, Parker, Somervell, Stephens, Tarrant, Wichita, Wise and Young Counties. If your company is in one of those and your dispute clears the threshold, this is the division that will hear it, and these are the two people who will decide it.

Jerry Bullard holds Division 8A. He came from Adams, Lynch & Loftin, where he was a shareholder board certified in civil appellate law, and he sits on the Texas Supreme Court Advisory Committee. Brian Stagner holds Division 8B. He came from Kelly Hart & Hallman, where he was counsel, and he teaches business law at TCU. Neither arrived from a trial bench. Both were appointed effective September 1, 2024 and reappointed on July 29, 2026 for terms running to September 1, 2028.

That matters more than it sounds. Two appellate-trained lawyers reading commercial agreements produce a particular kind of record, and twenty-four opinions in, the record shows it: close textual work on what an agreement says, and an unsentimental reading of the statute that decides whether they get to read the agreement at all. The division’s procedural numbers, median days to ruling and how its motions actually come out, are computed in the Performance Report.

The whole record is twenty-four opinions

Every published Eighth Division opinion from the division’s first ruling on November 6, 2024 through July 29, 2026. Not a selection. If it issued and it carries an Eighth Division caption, it is here.

How complete this is

This is the division’s complete published record: twenty-four opinions, November 6, 2024 through July 29, 2026. Every one of the twenty-four was independently re-verified against the court’s official PDFs on August 24, 2026, fifteen by direct full read and the remainder by the PDF’s own indexed caption string plus cause number. Checked again against the court’s published opinions list on August 28, 2026: no new Eighth Division opinion has issued since. We update this page within 72 hours of a new opinion issuing. The record is built from what the court has published, not from the docket, so a case that is pending but undecided will not appear here.

Citation	Case	Date	Judge	Subject	Holding
2024 Tex. Bus. 3	TEMA Oil and Gas v. ETC Field Services	November 6, 2024	Bullard	Removal	A case filed before September 1, 2024 cannot be removed. Section 8 of House Bill 19, construed in harmony with the rest of the act, expresses that intent. Sanctions denied for want of evidence the removal was frivolous.
2025 Tex. Bus. 15	Tall v. Vanderhoef	April 21, 2025	Bullard	LLC agreement	Courts must honor the terms parties use to define their obligations, including terms restricting fiduciary duties that would otherwise exist. Individual fiduciary claim dismissed under Rule 91a; fraud and theft claims survived; the case was stayed for arbitration.
2025 Tex. Bus. 18	G-Force & Associates v. Bloecher	May 14, 2025	Bullard	Qualified transaction	None of the identified transactions, and in particular the construction-project bids, involved a consummated agreement obligating a party to pay or receive the statutory minimum. Remanded to the 355th District Court, Hood County.
2025 Tex. Bus. 22	Slant Operating v. Octane Energy	May 23, 2025	Bullard	Threshold pleading	Plea to the jurisdiction denied. The plaintiff’s allegations, and the defendant’s failure to refute them, satisfied section 25A.004(d)(1).
2025 Tex. Bus. 24	Black Mountain SWD v. NGL Water Solutions Permian	June 30, 2025	Bullard	Amount in controversy	The amount in controversy does not include the value of a disputed right to receive royalties for the life of an agreement. The court put the figure at no more than $4.5 million and remanded.
2025 Tex. Bus. 29	M&M Livestock v. Robinson	August 4, 2025	Stagner	Threshold pleading	Plea to the jurisdiction denied. The amended petition pleaded facts sufficient to satisfy the five million dollar threshold.
2025 Tex. Bus. 32	Martens v. Lamkin Land & Cattle Co.	August 14, 2025	Stagner	Winding up	The court has subject matter jurisdiction over an application for the involuntary winding up of an LLC. Dominant jurisdiction did not displace it, because the earlier district court case was not sufficiently interrelated.
2025 Tex. Bus. 44	Lensabl v. RBH SPE One	November 5, 2025	Stagner	Veil piercing	Veil piercing against all of the individual defendants, and the contract claim against the principal, dismissed with prejudice. The common law fraud claim against him remained pending.
2025 Tex. Bus. 46	CRS Mechanical v. Norfolk Cold Storage	November 14, 2025	Stagner	Declaratory relief	Summary judgment against declaratory counterclaims that either duplicated issues already joined or sought relief beyond the court’s jurisdiction.
2025 Tex. Bus. 49	Crain v. Northern	December 17, 2025	Bullard	Excluded claims	Legal malpractice, and claims fractured out of a malpractice theory, dismissed without prejudice for want of subject matter jurisdiction. They are outside what this court may hear.
2025 Tex. Bus. 52	Slant Operating v. Octane Energy	December 22, 2025	Bullard	Third-party beneficiary	A non-signatory affiliate was not a third-party beneficiary of the agreement and lacked standing on its contract claim. All doubts resolve against conferring third-party beneficiary status.
2025 Tex. Bus. 53	Slant Operating v. Octane Energy	December 22, 2025	Bullard	Contract formation	The letter agreement was an enforceable agreement into which the defendant freely entered. It was not an unenforceable agreement to agree.
2025 Tex. Bus. 54	Slant Operating v. Octane Energy	December 22, 2025	Bullard	Damages	Summary judgment for the defendant on lost revenue for six named wells and on thirty-five unidentified future wells, denied as to the plaintiff’s incurred redesign costs and expectancy damages.
2026 Tex. Bus. 4	Crain v. Northern	February 2, 2026	Division 8A^†	Buy-sell option	Specific performance ordered under a mandatory buy-sell clause. Failure to respond within thirty days conclusively deemed the membership interest forfeited. Attorney’s fees awarded.
2026 Tex. Bus. 7	American Airlines v. JetBlue Airways	February 19, 2026	Division 8A^†	Personal jurisdiction	Special appearance denied. The court has specific personal jurisdiction over the defendant.
2026 Tex. Bus. 11	Crain v. Northern	March 11, 2026	Division 8A^†	Derivative standing	Derivative standing requires membership when suit is filed. The plaintiff was not a member on the filing date and so lacked a stake in the outcome. The buy-sell ruling six weeks earlier is what stripped him of it.
2026 Tex. Bus. 12	Galderma Laboratories v. Brenner	March 12, 2026	Stagner	Non-compete	Reformation under section 15.51(c) of the Business and Commerce Code is mandatory, not discretionary. Where a covenant is overbroad the court must narrow it rather than invalidate it, and it was narrowed to one product market.
2026 Tex. Bus. 16	Daimler Truck Financial Services v. Vanguard National Trailer	April 8, 2026	Division 8A^†	Personal jurisdiction	Special appearance granted. The plaintiff did not meet its burden of pleading that its claims arose out of or related to the defendants’ Texas contacts.
2026 Tex. Bus. 22	The Mark at Weatherford Owner v. German	May 6, 2026	Stagner	Contract construction	“Payable” means legally owed regardless of ability to pay, and “default” in an automatic-trigger clause means any failure, unqualified. Non-remittance triggered the put right.
2026 Tex. Bus. 27	DrinkPAK v. PRIII/Crow Building C	May 14, 2026	Division 8A^†	Removal deadline	Removal untimely. The defendants were on notice of business court jurisdiction from service of the original petition and from pre-suit correspondence, and could not remove years later after a remand from federal court.
2026 Tex. Bus. 28	Camino Real Developers v. RivenRock	May 15, 2026	Stagner	LLC transfer	A membership interest is a creature of contract and inseparable from the company agreement. A dilution mechanism runs with the interest on transfer, so a transferee cannot take the benefits and disclaim the obligations.
2026 Tex. Bus. 52	Simpson v. Simpson	July 29, 2026	Bullard	Fiduciary shield	The company agreement’s fiduciary shield provision controlled and absolved the managing member of liability for diluting the other member’s interest.
2026 Tex. Bus. 53	Riverside Homebuilders v. FG Aledo Development	July 29, 2026	Stagner	Statute of frauds	The contract, when made, must furnish the data necessary to identify the land with reasonable certainty. A selection right that hinges entirely on a third party’s future discretionary decision is not an unqualified right.
2026 Tex. Bus. 54	Fischer v. Fischer	July 29, 2026	Stagner	Judicial immunity	Once derived judicial immunity attaches to a function, every action taken with respect to that function is immune from suit, whether good or bad. Claims against the court-appointed party dismissed with prejudice.

† Five of these opinions carry no typed judge name. In 2026 Tex. Bus. 4, 7, 11, 16 and 27 the signature block reads only “Judge, Texas Business Court, Eighth Division” above a blank line. Division 8A is Judge Bullard’s docket, and the inference is the obvious one, but it is an inference and we will not print it as though the opinion said so. Note also that the docket letter is not a reliable proxy for the author: Judge Bullard signed 2024 Tex. Bus. 3, which sits on an 8B docket.

Ten of the twenty-four never reached the merits

Eight turned on whether the dispute belonged in this court. Two turned on whether a nonresident defendant could be brought to Texas at all. For a company weighing whether to remove a Tarrant County case, that ratio is the single most useful fact on this page, and the eight are worth reading as a group.

The transaction has to have happened. In G-Force the defendants pointed to construction project bids to clear the qualified-transaction test. Judge Bullard held that a bid is not a consummated agreement and cannot obligate anyone to pay or receive anything. The case went back to Hood County. The amount in controversy is what has accrued, not what might. Black Mountain SWD v. NGL is the citable statement of it. The plaintiff sought royalties on discarded saltwater; the defendant valued the right over the life of the agreement. The court declined to include the forward stream, put the amount at no more than $4.5 million, and remanded. Read that alongside section 25A.004(i), the aggregation rule House Bill 40 added in 2025, before assuming a long-running contract clears the threshold. Pleading to the threshold works, if you actually plead it. Slant and M&M Livestock both survived pleas to the jurisdiction, the second on an amended petition. The court is not looking for proof at that stage. It is looking for pleaded facts, and a defendant who does not refute them will lose the point. Some claims are simply out. Crain v. Northern dismissed legal malpractice, and claims fractured out of a malpractice theory, for want of jurisdiction. Section 25A.004(h) excludes malpractice even from supplemental jurisdiction, so there is no repackaging around it. The removal clock starts when you knew, not when you decided. DrinkPAK is the cautionary one. The defendants had notice of business court jurisdiction from service of the original petition and from pre-suit correspondence. They removed years later, after a federal remand, and the court held it untimely. Section 25A.006(f) runs from the later of service or the date the removing party discovered or reasonably should have discovered the jurisdictional facts, and “should have” does real work. And one that expanded the door. Martens v. Lamkin held the court has jurisdiction over an application to wind up an LLC involuntarily, and that dominant jurisdiction did not send it back merely because an earlier district court suit existed between the parties.

The one to plan around

A remand order from the business court is not appealable. In ETC Field Services v. TEMA Oil and Gas, No. 15-24-00124-CV, the Fifteenth Court of Appeals dismissed the appeal for want of jurisdiction, holding that no statute authorizes an interlocutory appeal of a business court remand order and that a remand order is not a final judgment. The appeal arose out of this division, from cause 24-BC08B-0001. If a removal fails here, the case is in district court and it stays there. Treat the removal decision as one you make once. Three of the Fifteenth Court’s twenty-eight business decisions arose from this division, and two of the three are that holding and its companion mandamus. They are indexed, with holdings, on the Fifteenth Court of Appeals page.

How the division reads an agreement

The merits opinions are shorter in number and consistent in direction. Where the parties wrote something down, the Eighth Division gives it effect.

Contractual limits on fiduciary exposure hold. Tall v. Vanderhoef put it plainly: courts must honor the terms parties use to define the scope of their obligations, including terms restricting fiduciary duties that might otherwise exist. Simpson v. Simpson, fifteen months later, applied a company agreement’s fiduciary shield to absolve a managing member of liability for diluting the other member. Two judges, same instinct. If a Texas company agreement waives or narrows duties, expect this division to enforce the waiver rather than look for a way around it. A membership interest travels with its agreement. Camino Real v. RivenRock held that a membership interest is a creature of contract and inseparable from the company agreement, so a dilution mechanism runs with the interest on transfer. A transferee takes the whole document. This is the case to cite when someone acquires an interest and then argues the inconvenient provisions do not bind them. An overbroad non-compete gets narrowed, not killed. Galderma v. Brenner treated section 15.51(c) of the Business and Commerce Code as mandatory: where a covenant is overbroad, the court must reform it rather than invalidate it. The court struck the ownership-and-management language from the activity scope and the confidential-information trigger from the geographic reach, then enforced what was left within a single product market. Texas employers already knew reformation was available. What is useful here is a Fort Worth judge treating it as an obligation. Land descriptions get read strictly. Riverside Homebuilders v. FG Aledo voided a contract under the statute of frauds because the lots could not be identified when the contract was made; the selection depended on a homebuilder’s later discretionary decision. Judge Stagner reached the same conclusion a week earlier in Village Crossing v. West Creek Investments, sitting in Houston, where a future-survey arrangement failed for the same reason. Two opinions in eight days is not a coincidence. Trigger language means what it says. The Mark at Weatherford Owner v. German read “payable” as legally owed regardless of ability to pay, and “default” in an automatic-trigger clause as any failure, unqualified. The put right fired.

Both judges also sit in Houston

An index of Eighth Division captions does not capture everything these two have written. Judge Bullard authored OWL AssetCo I v. EOG Resources, 2025 Tex. Bus. 47, in the Eleventh Division. Judge Stagner authored Village Crossing v. West Creek Investments, 2026 Tex. Bus. 49, there as well, and several more besides. The most recent instance is Judge Stagner’s CAM Industrial Solutions v. Brown & Root Industrial Services, 2026 Tex. Bus. 56, decided August 10, 2026, again in the Eleventh Division. The Eleventh Division is the busiest in the state and judges from the Third, Fourth and Eighth have all been pulled into it.

Section 25A.009 allows business court judges to exchange benches. The opinions recite that the judge sat “by assignment” without saying which provision produced it, and we have not seen the underlying orders. The practical consequence is simple enough: if you are researching how Judge Stagner reads the statute of frauds, searching Eighth Division opinions alone will miss half the answer.

The court’s own opinions list also mislabels 2025 Tex. Bus. 47 as an Eighth Division case. The opinion itself reads Cause No. 25-BC11A-0052, Eleventh Division. A count that trusts the list will be one high.

What this record does not tell you

Twenty-four opinions is a real body of law and a small sample, and the honest limits are worth stating before anyone plans around it.

There is no published post-trial opinion from this division. That is not the same as saying no Eighth Division case has been tried. It means the division has not published one, and you should not infer a trial record from silence. A per-judge split from this corpus is approximate. Five opinions carry no author’s name. Any tally of who ruled which way rests partly on docket inference, and we have marked where. Two rulings is not a pattern. Judge Stagner has decided fewer threshold questions than Judge Bullard. Drawing a conclusion about his remand tendencies from that sample would be a guess dressed as analysis, and we are not going to do it. A prior open question is now closed. 2025 Tex. Bus. 3 once looked like it might be an unverified Eighth Division opinion, which would have made the corpus twenty-five. It is not. It is Osmose Utilities Services v. Navarro County Electric Cooperative, decided January 31, 2025 by Judge Andrea K. Bouressa, cause no. 24-BC01A-0011, a First Division opinion confirmed by direct read of the court’s PDF. The corpus stands at twenty-four.

Before you remove a North Texas case

Six questions, in the order they actually bite.

One. Is the county in the Eighth Division? If it is outside all five operating divisions, section 25A.006(e) blocks removal outright and nothing else matters. Two. Does the claim fall in one of the two enumerated lists in section 25A.004(b) or (d)? Three. Does the amount in controversy exceed five million dollars on the day of filing, measured the way Black Mountain measures it? Four. Is a publicly traded company a party, in which case section 25A.004(c) removes the threshold entirely? Five. Has the thirty-day clock in section 25A.006(f) already started, and when did you first have the facts? Six. Is anything in the case excluded by section 25A.004(g) or (h), and if so, are you prepared to litigate in two courts at once?

The full test, including the exclusions and the retroactivity that catches people out, is on the Texas Business Court jurisdiction page. The complete opinion table, sortable and filterable, is in the Texas Business Court case tracker. Where an appeal goes, and what the Fifteenth Court has done with these cases, is in the Fifteenth Court of Appeals index.

Sources

Every opinion above was verified against the court’s published PDF at txcourts.gov. Party spellings follow the opinions rather than the court’s index, which renders Simpson as “Simson,” Daimler as “Daimer” and RBH SPE One as “RBH SBE One.” The court’s opinions also use two citation formats, printing both “Tex. Bus. Ct.” and “Tex. Bus.”; we follow the index form. The list does not carry the 2024 opinions at all, which is why TEMA is missing from counts built on it.

Primary: Texas Business Court published opinions · Tex. Gov’t Code ch. 25A · House Bill 40, 89th Leg., R.S. · Governor’s Fort Worth appointment release.

Statewide statistics: the Texas Business Court Codex maintained by the SMU Corporate Governance Initiative, which codes the full statewide corpus and is the resource we point people to for court-wide numbers. This page does not duplicate it. It does the one thing the Codex does not: the Fort Worth record, complete, with a holding you can read.

Last updated August 28, 2026. Corpus current through 2026 Tex. Bus. 54, issued July 29, 2026, and independently re-verified against the court’s PDFs on August 24, 2026; checked again against the court’s opinions list on August 28, 2026 with no new Eighth Division opinion found. Free to cite with attribution. Corrections to hello@kraus.law.

Common questions

Which counties are in the Texas Business Court Eighth Division?

Archer, Clay, Cooke, Denton, Eastland, Erath, Hood, Jack, Johnson, Montague, Palo Pinto, Parker, Somervell, Stephens, Tarrant, Wichita, Wise and Young. The division sits in Fort Worth.

Who are the Eighth Division judges?

Jerry Bullard holds Division 8A and Brian Stagner holds Division 8B. Both were appointed effective September 1, 2024 and reappointed on July 29, 2026 for terms running through September 1, 2028.

How many opinions has the Eighth Division published?

Twenty-four, from November 6, 2024 through July 29, 2026. All of them are listed on this page. Note that the court’s own online opinions list omits the 2024 opinions, so counts built from it come up one short.

Can I appeal if the Business Court sends my case back to district court?

No. In ETC Field Services v. TEMA Oil and Gas the Fifteenth Court of Appeals held that no statute authorizes an interlocutory appeal of a business court remand order and that such an order is not a final judgment. The appeal was dismissed for want of jurisdiction.

What is the Business Court threshold in 2026?

Five million dollars, and it has been since House Bill 40 took effect on September 1, 2025. The ten million dollar figure still circulating, including on the Fifteenth Court’s own website, is obsolete. There is no threshold at all under section 25A.004(c) if a publicly traded company is a party.

How does the Eighth Division measure the amount in controversy?

By what has accrued at filing. In Black Mountain SWD v. NGL Water Solutions Permian the court declined to include the value of a disputed right to receive royalties over the life of an agreement, put the figure at no more than $4.5 million, and remanded.

Will this court enforce a fiduciary duty waiver in an LLC agreement?

On the record so far, yes. Tall v. Vanderhoef held that courts must honor terms restricting fiduciary duties that would otherwise exist, and Simpson v. Simpson applied a company agreement’s fiduciary shield to a dilution claim.

Do Eighth Division judges hear cases outside Fort Worth?

Yes. Both sit by assignment in the Eleventh Division in Houston, and their opinions from those sittings carry an Eleventh Division caption. Searching Eighth Division opinions alone will miss part of what either judge has held.

Whether to remove is a decision you make once. A remand cannot be appealed.

Talk it through with Chuck Or start with: How can I help?

The words you'll hear

If this goes further, these are the terms that will come up, from us or from the other side. Each one links to a fuller explanation.

Remand: Remand sends a removed case back to the district court or county court at law where it started.
Qualified Transaction: A qualified transaction is the deal-size trigger that pulls a contract dispute into the Texas Business Court.
Amount in Controversy: The amount in controversy is the money genuinely at stake when the suit is filed, and it is the gatekeeper for the Texas Business Court.
Reformation (of a Covenant Not to Compete): Reformation is a court's rewriting of an overbroad non-compete so that it becomes enforceable.
Statute of Frauds: The doctrine that certain categories of contracts are unenforceable unless evidenced by a writing signed by the party to be charged.
Derivative Standing: Derivative standing is the right to sue on behalf of an entity for a wrong done to it.
Third-Party Beneficiary: A third-party beneficiary is a non-signatory the contracting parties clearly intended to benefit and to give an enforceable right.

Last updated: August 28, 2026