Texas Business Court Cases.

The data

73 verified Texas Business Court opinions, including the complete Eighth Division corpus. Filter by division, click any column header to sort. Each row carries a stable anchor you can cite directly.

Last updated: August 28, 2026 · Eighth Division corpus verified opinion by opinion against the court's published PDFs. Statewide entries reviewed against the court's opinions list, current through 2026 Tex. Bus. 60 (August 17, 2026), the most recent opinion on record as of this check.

Patterns and observations

What twenty-three months of Business Court opinions reveal.

Phase one: foundational jurisdictional rulings

The first six months produced a clear pattern: cases filed before September 1, 2024 cannot be removed to the Business Court, regardless of party consent. This rule was established across multiple opinions (Energy Transfer v. Culberson Midstream, Synergy Global v. Hinduja, TEMA Oil and Gas v. ETC Field Services, Winans v. Berry) and continues to control. Section 8 of H.B. 19 was the dispositive provision.

Phase two: "qualified transaction" jurisprudence

Throughout 2025, opinions interpreted Section 25A.004, particularly the "qualified transaction" requirement, amount-in-controversy thresholds, and how internal-affairs claims fit. The Atlas IDF v. NexPoint Real Estate Partners opinion (May 2025) is the comprehensive reference on qualified-transaction analysis. HB 40 (effective September 1, 2025) lowered the threshold from $10M to $5M and was held retroactive for cases filed on or after September 1, 2024 (Yaun v. Battle & Sands).

Phase three: substantive merits and trial activity

Early 2026 marked a transition to substantive merits work. The first bench trial completed; the first jury trial (Quintero v. Urban Infraconstruction) began but ended in a directed verdict for the defendant after plaintiffs' case-in-chief. The Mavericks v. Stars opinion (April 2026), a 90-page contract construction tour-de-force, and the Marathon Oil v. Mercuria Energy force-majeure trilogy demonstrate the court producing the kind of detailed, reasoned commercial opinions Texas legislators intended.

Notable opinion clusters

Several cases produced multiple opinions over time as litigation progressed, Marathon Oil v. Mercuria Energy (4 opinions on force majeure, contract construction, liquidated damages); Primexx Energy v. Primexx Energy Corp. (5 opinions on partnership duties, drag-along rights, jurisdiction); Crain v. Northern (3 opinions on buy-sell specific performance, malpractice jurisdiction, derivative standing); Slant Operating v. Octane Energy (4 opinions); Preston Hollow Capital v. Truist Bank (3 opinions, on punitive-damages waivers, the Chapter 33 responsible-third-party designation, and express-trust formation in the underlying bond documents). These threads provide useful longitudinal views of how the court handles complex cases.

Who is writing, and where they sit

Three judges have authored a disproportionate share of the statewide record: Whitehill in the First Division, Bullard in the Eighth, and Andrews in the Third. Each has an identifiable way of reading the statute, which matters when a removal decision is on the table.

Division membership is not the whole picture. Both Eighth Division judges also sit in the Eleventh Division, Houston, by assignment, and their opinions from those sittings carry an Eleventh Division caption. Judge Bullard wrote OWL AssetCo I v. EOG Resources, 2025 Tex. Bus. 47, that way. Judge Stagner wrote Village Crossing v. West Creek Investments, 2026 Tex. Bus. 49, and then CAM Industrial Solutions v. Brown & Root, 2026 Tex. Bus. 56, that way, and both are in the table above with the assignment noted. A reader who looks only at Eighth Division captions will miss part of what these two judges have held. Under Section 25A.014(a) a judge may be assigned to another division by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Texas; Section 25A.009 separately lets business court judges exchange benches. Which mechanism produced any given sitting is not stated on the face of the opinions.

What the Eighth Division record shows

Ten of the division's twenty-four opinions are jurisdictional. Eight of those turn on whether the case belonged in the Business Court, and the division has more than once concluded that it did not. G-Force v. Bloecher holds that a construction bid is not a consummated transaction and so cannot be a qualified transaction. Black Mountain SWD v. NGL holds that the amount in controversy is what has accrued by the date of filing, not the value of a royalty stream running forward, which is the citable statement of a narrow reading. Both remanded.

On the merits the division reads agreements closely and enforces what they say. Tall v. Vanderhoef and Simpson v. Simpson both gave full effect to contractual limits on fiduciary exposure. Camino Real v. RivenRock held that a dilution provision runs with a membership interest on transfer, so a transferee takes the agreement whole. Galderma v. Brenner treated reformation under Section 15.51(c) of the Business and Commerce Code as mandatory rather than discretionary and narrowed an overbroad non-compete instead of striking it. Riverside Homebuilders v. FG Aledo applied the statute of frauds strictly to a lot-selection right that depended on a third party's later choice.

Two cautions on reading patterns into twenty-four opinions. The division has published nothing following a trial, which is not the same as saying no case has been tried. And a per-judge split drawn from this corpus rests in part on docket inference for the five opinions that carry no typed name, so it is approximate. Neither point is a reason to skip the record. Both are reasons to cite it precisely.