Fifteenth Court of Appeals: the business decisions

The one to read: In re Frank Jackson

If you read a single decision on this page, read this one. It is the Fifteenth Court's first substantive merits opinion on a doctrine of general application, the first designated an opinion rather than a memorandum opinion, the first to draw a dissent, and the first conditional grant of mandamus in a business court matter.

A company's chief executive was terminated for cause. The fallout put several hundred million dollars in play, and someone hurt by the decision sued the company's general counsel personally for tortious interference, on the theory that what he had given was business advice rather than legal advice. The Business Court refused to dismiss him. The Fifteenth Court conditionally granted mandamus and ordered him out of the case.

The reasoning matters more than the result. Attorney immunity turns on the function the lawyer was performing, not on how wrongful the plaintiff says the conduct was. Advising a board on whether it may terminate a chief executive for cause, when the exposure runs to that scale, is exactly what a general counsel is retained to do. And no express engagement agreement is needed; an implied attorney-client relationship is enough.

For anyone serving as general counsel, in-house or fractional, this is the case that says the advice you are paid to give does not expose you personally to the losing side, and that you can get out at the pleading stage rather than litigate for three years to the same end. Justice Farris dissented, so treat it as settled at this court and not beyond it.

The jurisdictional line, in order

Seven of the twenty-eight decide who gets into this court and who is sent back out. Read together they are the whole of the court's temporal-jurisdiction doctrine, and they moved.

February 2025, the door closes twice. ETC Field Services and Synergy Global, issued the same day, both hold that a business court remand order is not appealable. No statute authorises an interlocutory appeal of one and it is not a final judgment. The companion mandamus in ETC adds the substantive half: removal does not commence a new action, it moves an existing one, so the removal statute does not reach a case filed before September 1, 2024. July 2025, two attempts to reopen it fail. Durant holds that action means the entire lawsuit rather than a single claim, so amending an old suit does not bring it in. Kimco closes the cleverer version: an amended petition supersedes what came before, so it cannot commence something already commenced, and adding a publicly traded company as a defendant does not restart anything. July 31, 2025, the legislature reopens it. A first Lone Star NGL opinion, issued under the same cause number as the vacatur below, reversed the Business Court's dismissal for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction. House Bill 40's Section 8 effective-date language, the court held, does not by itself bar the Business Court from hearing a pre-September-2024 action where the parties agree to be there, and it remanded for the Business Court to decide in the first instance whether to grant permission under Government Code section 25A.021. October 2025, the sequel. The Business Court granted that permission, and the Fifteenth Court's second opinion in the same cause vacated the Business Court's remand order and sent the case back again. The route back in is consent, and only consent, and it took this court two opinions in one docket to settle how a party gets there. (Corpus convention: this index counts dockets, not opinions. The docket is listed once, at its October 9, 2025 final disposition; the July 31 opinion is the reasoning that got it there.) February 2026, the exit is priced. ColossusBets holds that the Business Court keeps plenary power to reconsider a ruling denying remand, and that a plaintiff who expressly disclaims the theories supporting jurisdiction waives them by litigation conduct. A plaintiff can plead its way out of this court. It cannot plead its way back in afterwards.

One thing this court has not decided: whether an order denying a plea to the jurisdiction is appealable. Section 51.014(a)(8) of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code reaches only a plea by a governmental unit, so in an ordinary commercial case there is no interlocutory appeal from a denial and mandamus is the route. That is our reading of the statute, not a holding of this court, and it is why the docket below is dominated by original proceedings.

All twenty-eight decisions

Every business court decision from the court's first, on January 24, 2025, through August 6, 2026. Decisions marked routine are one-line denials or dismissals reached without the court stating its own reasoning; a page that dressed each of those up as precedent would be worth less than one that tells you where to stop reading.

Divisions above are stated from each opinion's own recitation of the court below. Where a source pairs a division with a county, we have not reproduced it, for the reason set out in the next section.

What the outcomes show

Coding proceeding type against disposition turns the table above into something a litigant can use before filing, not only after losing. The base for the mandamus figures below is the sixteen original proceedings this court has decided; the two most recent decisions, both interlocutory appeals rather than mandamus petitions, do not change that base.

Twelve of the sixteen mandamus petitions were denied outright, without the court reaching the merits of anything. Two more were withdrawn by the relators before the court ruled. One, In re Faisal Chaudhry, cannot be coded at all, for the reason given below. That leaves a single petition the court granted, conditionally: In re Frank Jackson, in July 2026.

Nine of the twenty-eight decisions ended in a voluntary dismissal, the single most common outcome after denial. Eight of those were already on this index; the ninth, the second Kreines v. ES3 Minerals appeal, is added by this update, dismissed on the appellants' own unopposed motion after the underlying case reached final judgment and the interlocutory appeal became unnecessary.

Three decisions were dismissed for want of appellate jurisdiction, on two different theories. Two, decided the same day in February 2025, hold that a business court remand order is not a final judgment and that no statute authorises an interlocutory appeal of one (ETC Field Services, Synergy Global); that theory is addressed in full above, under "The jurisdictional line, in order." The third, Berry v. Powers, decided August 6, 2026, reached a dismissal by a different road: a later final judgment mooted the pending interlocutory appeal of a temporary injunction, so the court vacated the injunction order and dismissed the appeal rather than proceed on a controversy that no longer existed.

The practical line every litigant needs: in an ordinary commercial case there is no interlocutory appeal of a remand ruling. Mandamus is the route, and it has succeeded once in sixteen tries.

The division and county key

Worth its own section, because the public sources have it wrong and a curated index that repeats the error is not worth curating. The Fifteenth Court's opinions cite the originating business court by division code. The widely used free databases then pair those codes with a county, and the pairings are frequently wrong. In several listings the First and Eighth Divisions are both given as Travis County, which is neither.

Each leg of that is confirmed from at least two opinions' own recitations. Anywhere a source pairs a code other than 3A or 3B with Travis County, the county is wrong. One caution on our own list: the recitation we could retrieve for Dhamani reads Division 1A, Travis County, which cannot be right, and we could not determine whether the error is in the opinion's caption block or introduced downstream. We have listed it by division and cause number only.

The five operating divisions, the counties each covers and the ten judges are set out on the judges and divisions page. The complete published record of the Eighth Division, which is the one that hears North Texas cases, is on the Eighth Division practice guide.

What this list does not include

Two gaps remain, stated rather than smoothed over, and one closed since the last update.

One decision we could not read. In re Faisal Chaudhry is published as an image scan with no text layer, and no other source carries the text. It is listed with no holding rather than a guessed one. A short tail at the end. The free databases this index is built from index through late August 2026. A decision issued in the last few weeks would not appear here yet. This page is reviewed monthly. Two sealed captions, now resolved. An earlier pass on this page flagged two decisions captioned only Plaintiff v. Defendant with no court-below line shown, and could not rule out a business court origin for either. Both are now confirmed not to be business court matters. No. 15-25-00009-CV (Sammy Tawakkol v. Sheila Vasquez, et al.) is a Texas DPS criminal-history-records suit out of the 200th District Court of Travis County. No. 15-25-00179-CV (Alicia Glenny v. Jeremy Epperson) is a suit affecting the parent-child relationship out of the 459th District Court of Travis County. Neither belongs on this index, and the count stays twenty-eight.

The court's own docket search would settle all three and it blocks automated retrieval, so this list is built from the published opinions rather than from the docket. That is a limit worth knowing about any index of this court, including ours.

Why this list exists

The Business Court has a first-rate free index. SMU's Corporate Governance Initiative runs the Texas Business Court Codex, which codes the statewide opinion corpus with per-judge cards and a live feed, and we point people there for statewide statistics rather than building a second one.

Its appellate court has nothing equivalent. The Codex covers the Business Court only. The published commentary on the Fifteenth Court runs as a blog feed, which is useful for following along and no use at all when you need to know what the court has actually held on a question. So this is the index, and it is maintained because twenty-eight decisions is still a body of law you can read in an afternoon.

Holdings above are stated in our own words from the opinions rather than quoted. If you need language to put in a brief, go to the opinion. Every decision is published free through the court and through the public case databases. Statutory text: Tex. Gov’t Code ch. 25A. Constitutional challenge: In re Dallas County, No. 24-0426 (Tex. Aug. 23, 2024). Jurisdictional limits: Supreme Court of Texas Misc. Docket No. 25-9014.

Last updated August 28, 2026. Current through Berry v. Powers, decided August 6, 2026 — re-checked August 28, 2026, no further business-court-track decision found since.