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The Hilltop Docket
Intelligence on the Texas Business Court — opinions, dockets, hearings, doctrine. A research publication of the SMU Corporate Governance Initiative at Cox & Dedman.
Editorial Independence The Hilltop Docket has no financial, advisory, or other relationship with any litigant before the Texas Business Court, or with re:SearchTX or its parent. Interpretations are the authors' own and do not represent the positions of SMU, the Cox School, or the Dedman School. Any future conflict will be disclosed on Page One.
Issue No. 7 · Week of June 15–22, 2026 · lede
A quiet week on the bench: a single new memorandum opinion has posted to the court’s official index since our last edition — 2026 Tex. Bus. 40 — carrying the corpus contiguously past the thirty-nine opinions we reported last week. Local Marketing v. Bennett is the bench’s first anti-SLAPP (TCPA) ruling in the cohort to date: the Eleventh Division granted a Texas Citizens Participation Act motion dismissing a departing employee’s defamation and tortious-interference counterclaims for want of damages evidence, and awarded the statute’s mandatory attorney’s fees.
Coverage in this issue: a full bench treatment of the one newly posted opinion; a doctrinal note on how the TCPA’s three-step burden operates in the Business Court; the dockets-and-calendar posture; and an ExxonMobil redomestication status check. All citations Bluebook 21st; all primary sources hyperlinked and read against the underlying opinion PDF.
- Wk-7Week in review · June 22
- 1New opinion posted to official index
- 402026 Tex. Bus. citation added
- $18,010Mandatory TCPA fee award
From the editor
A quiet week — one opinion, and a clinic on the cost of an unproven counterclaim.
Welcome to The Hilltop Docket’s Issue No. 7. Since our last Week-in-Review, one new opinion has posted to the court’s official opinions index — 2026 Tex. Bus. 40, a memorandum opinion signed June 15. As of this issue’s cutoff at noon Central today, the corpus runs contiguously through that citation, with no gaps. After a stretch of busier weeks, the bench slowed: a single opinion, but a substantive one.
The opinion is Local Marketing, Inc. v. Bennett, a departing-employee dispute in which the plaintiff, after removing its trade-secret suit to the Business Court, used the Texas Citizens Participation Act — Texas’s anti-SLAPP statute — to dismiss the defendants’ defamation and tortious-interference counterclaims. The counterclaims arose from letters the plaintiff’s counsel sent to the defendants’ customers describing a temporary restraining order. The Eleventh Division held the TCPA applied because those letters were communications “pertaining to” a judicial proceeding, then dismissed the counterclaims at the prima-facie stage: the counterclaimant offered no clear and specific evidence of damages, and the alleged statement was not defamatory per se. Because dismissal was required, the court awarded the statute’s mandatory attorney’s fees — $18,010 (¶ 29) — while declining to impose sanctions. We treat the opinion, a doctrinal note on the TCPA’s mechanics, the dockets-and-calendar posture, and the ExxonMobil redomestication status below.
On the bench
One opinion, now posted: 2026 Tex. Bus. 40.
The entry below has been read against its underlying opinion PDF on the court’s official opinions index, where it is styled a memorandum opinion. The sequential per-year citations remain contiguous from 2024 Tex. Bus. 1 through 2026 Tex. Bus. 40 with no gaps. The opinion issued from the Eleventh Division on June 15; it was signed by Judge Sharp of the Fourth Division, sitting by assignment.
Local Marketing, Inc. v. Bennett — TCPA anti-SLAPP motion granted; defamation and tortious-interference counterclaims dismissed; $18,010 in mandatory fees.
2026 Tex. Bus. 40 (mem. op.); Eleventh Division; Sharp, J. (Fourth Division, sitting by assignment); signed June 15, 2026; cause 26-BC11A-0026. Ruling: plaintiff’s partial motion to dismiss the counterclaims under the Texas Citizens Participation Act GRANTED; counterclaims dismissed; $18,010 in attorney’s fees awarded; sanctions declined.
In plain EnglishA company sued its former employees, then wrote to their new customers describing a court order. The customers’ side sued back for defamation. The court used Texas’s anti-SLAPP law to throw out those counterclaims — because the company’s letters were about a lawsuit, and because the counter-suing side put forward no real proof it had been harmed — and made the losing side pay the company’s legal fees.
This is a departing-employee case. Marketing company Local Marketing, Inc. sued former executives and employees in a Harris County district court, alleging they formed a competing marketing company using Local’s trade secrets and in breach of their employment contracts. After Local removed the case to the Business Court, defendants Heidi Jo McIvor and McIvor Marketing, LLC counterclaimed for defamation and tortious interference with business relations, based on letters Local’s counsel had sent to customers describing a temporary restraining order in the suit. Local moved to dismiss those counterclaims under the TCPA, Texas’s anti-SLAPP statute.
The court worked the TCPA’s three-step framework (Montelongo v. Abrea, 622 S.W.3d 290 (Tex. 2021)). At step one, the statute applied: the letters were “communications” that “pertain[ed] to” a judicial proceeding — they attached the TRO and cited the underlying suit’s caption and cause number — and so fell within the “exercise of the right to petition” (Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 27.001(4)(A)(i)). At step two, McIvor failed to carry its prima-facie burden. Damages are an essential element of both the defamation and the tortious-interference claims, and McIvor’s declaration that it “was damaged” was conclusory; its account of time spent “explaining the litigation” to three customers showed no economic or noneconomic loss (USA Lending Grp. v. Winstead PC, 669 S.W.3d 195 (Tex. 2023); In re Lipsky, 460 S.W.3d 579 (Tex. 2015); Landry’s, Inc. v. Animal Legal Def. Fund, 631 S.W.3d 40 (Tex. 2021)). The court also rejected the defamation-per-se theory: a false statement that McIvor had been enjoined from soliciting customers is not peculiarly injurious to the marketing profession, nor did the letters accuse McIvor of a crime (Bedford v. Spassoff, 520 S.W.3d 901 (Tex. 2017)).
Having found the counterclaims fail at the prima-facie stage, the court did not reach Local’s affirmative defense of judicial-proceedings immunity (see also Ferchichi v. Whataburger Rests. LLC, 713 S.W.3d 330, 336 (Tex. 2025), cited at ¶¶ 28–29 for the TCPA affirmative-defense framework and the mandatory-fee-award holding). Because dismissal was required, the attorney’s-fee award was mandatory under § 27.009(a)(1); the court awarded the full $18,010 Local sought (¶ 29) and, finding no improper purpose, declined to impose sanctions. The TCPA discovery suspension was lifted.
Doctrinal note
The TCPA in the Business Court — a fast, fee-shifting screen for litigation-adjacent speech.
Local Marketing is a useful primer on how the Texas Citizens Participation Act operates once a commercial dispute lands in the Business Court. The statute runs in three steps: the movant must first show the challenged claim is “based on or is in response to” its exercise of the rights of speech, petition, or association; the burden then shifts to the claimant to make out, “by clear and specific evidence,” a prima-facie case on each essential element; and a surviving claim may still be dismissed if the movant proves an affirmative defense as a matter of law. The decisive move here was at step one: the court read “exercise of the right to petition” to reach not only communications made in a proceeding but those “pertaining to” it — and Local’s letters, which attached the TRO and cited the suit’s caption and cause number, plainly concerned the lawsuit. That framing pulled the customer letters inside the anti-SLAPP statute and shifted the burden to the counterclaimant.
The opinion is most instructive on what “clear and specific evidence” of damages requires. A conclusory averment that a party “was damaged,” or that it spent time it might otherwise have spent earning revenue, does not raise a rational inference of loss; as the court put it, drawing on Landry’s and In re Lipsky, a claimant must connect a particular statement to a particular, foreseeable harm. The defamation-per-se path failed too: a false statement that a marketing competitor had been enjoined from soliciting customers is not the kind of profession-specific disparagement that lets a plaintiff skip proof of damages. Two practical points follow for litigants. First, the fee award is mandatory once a TCPA motion is granted (§ 27.009(a)(1)) — here, $18,010 — so an unsupported counterclaim is not a free shot. Second, the court flagged that the dismissal does not necessarily end the matter: with events “developing in real time,” the scheduling order leaves room to amend on claims arising from new harm, and the TCPA’s discovery suspension was lifted once the motion was decided.
Redomestication watch
ExxonMobil’s move to Texas — status check.
ExxonMobil’s May 27 shareholder vote approved the change of incorporation from New Jersey to Texas (roughly 71.2% of votes cast in favor, per the company’s Form 8-K under Item 5.07).71.2% reflects votes for ÷ (for + against); including abstentions the figure is ≈70.5% (Form 8-K Item 5.07, acc. 0000034088-26-000078). We continue to watch for the effective date of the conversion and any follow-on charter or governance filings as they land on EDGAR; we have nothing new to certify on that front this week.
A standing reminder, because the names coincide: the Brown v. Exxon Mobil bench opinion (2026 Tex. Bus. 35) covered in an earlier edition is unrelated to the redomestication — a pre-existing employment-discrimination matter that turned on the nature of the claim, not the company’s state of organization. Nothing in this week’s opinion bears on the ExxonMobil conversion.
Dockets & calendar
Filings and hearings — week of June 15–22.
The re:SearchTX alert stream we monitor remained active this week, generating filing, case, and hearing matches across the Business Court and Fifteenth Court of Appeals search profiles. As is typical, the bulk of the volume reflects appellate and criminal matters that fall outside the Business Court’s civil jurisdiction; we do not report those as Business Court docketing. A handful of commercial-styled matters surfaced in the feed, but the alert metadata alone does not establish that a given matter is a Chapter 25A Business Court proceeding, and re:SearchTX’s underlying case and filing records are login-gated. Consistent with our source-discipline protocol, we hold those items for verification before treating them as Business Court filings rather than naming them here.
For real-time docket activity and the hearings calendar, the live monitor is the authoritative source between editions and refreshes every thirty minutes — see the Cases tab and the Hearings tab.
Docket numbers and hearing settings are drawn from re:SearchTX’s filing-activity export and may not capture matters set on internal calendars that have not yet generated public alerts. Where the court’s export omits hearing times, those settings appear on the live monitor as they are published.
Looking ahead
What we are tracking.
SWAPA’s repleading. SWAPA v. Boeing (2026 Tex. Bus. 37) set a June 19 deadline for SWAPA to amend its inducement-causation pleading. That deadline has now passed; we are watching for the repleaded petition and any renewed dispositive motion on the docket.
Anti-SLAPP fee practice. Whether Local Marketing’s mandatory $18,010 fee award, and its “pertaining to” reading of the right to petition, draw further TCPA motions against litigation-adjacent counterclaims in the Business Court — and whether McIvor amends on any new-harm theory the scheduling order still permits.
ExxonMobil. The effective date of the New Jersey→Texas conversion and any follow-on charter or governance filings, surfaced to the monitor as they land on EDGAR.
Issue No. 8 (anticipated, week of June 29). The week’s new opinions, any verified new petitions, and the hearings calendar.
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01 / Primary sources
Court text, dockets, filings of record.
Opinions are pulled from txcourts.gov/businesscourt; dockets from re:SearchTX; statutes from capitol.texas.gov. Practitioner blogs may appear in scholarship cites but are never load-bearing.
02 / Bluebook 21st
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Per-opinion entries follow Bluebook 21st short-form conventions; sequential per-year citations are preserved (e.g., 2026 Tex. Bus. 29 follows 28).
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