The Hilltop Docket

Issue No. 17 · Monday, September 7, 2026 · Week in review · Covering August 30 – September 5, 2026.

For three consecutive weeks the Texas Business Court’s opinion register has not moved. The last citation on it, 2026 Tex. Bus. 60, was signed on August 17 — twenty-one days before this issue goes to press. Read alone, that number invites the wrong inference. The court’s intake tells the opposite story: in the five business days of this coverage window, eight new petitions were filed across four divisions, six of them into the Eleventh Division alone, and one of them naming a national health insurer as defendant to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. A court that publishes nothing for three weeks is not necessarily a court with nothing to do. This issue reports what the docket did while the register stood still — and is careful, throughout, about the difference between the two.

The filing week · eight new petitions

The table below is the week’s new Business Court intake as the docket record states it. Every row carries a case style, a cause number, a division, a presiding judge, a case type and a filing date, and every one of those fields is copied from the court records system rather than characterized. No petition below has been read. Nothing here describes what any party alleges, what any claim is worth, or how any matter is likely to come out; a new petition is one side’s account of a dispute and no court has yet said anything about any of them.

Two rendering notes, so the table can be checked against its source. The alert notice for 26-BC11A-0093 renders the individual defendant’s surname as “Hltl” in the case title while rendering the trust as “The Hiltl Family Trust” in the same row; we print “Hiltl” for both and flag the discrepancy rather than silently choosing. The alert notice for 26-BC11A-0095 returns the surname “D’Sylva” with the apostrophe replaced by substitution characters, a transport-encoding artifact of the notice rather than a docket entry; we print the ordinary spelling. Anyone relying on either style should confirm it against the docket of record.

The one that will be read outside Texas

Of the eight, The University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center v. UnitedHealthcare of Texas, Inc. is the filing most likely to draw attention beyond the Business Court bar. A state-owned academic cancer center has brought a contract action against a national commercial health insurer’s Texas entity, in a court built for large commercial disputes, and drawn Judge Barnard in the Eleventh Division. That is the whole of what the record establishes today. Whether the dispute concerns reimbursement, network participation, claims administration or something else is not something the case-type field can tell you, and this publication has not read the petition. We flag it because readers of the Docket should know it was filed, and we will treat it when there is a ruling to treat.

Six petitions in eight days · the Eleventh Division

The distribution is the part of this week’s intake that is checkable without reading a single pleading. Of the eight new petitions, five landed in the Eleventh Division — four in 11a and one in 11b. Add Brigham v. Shepard, filed into 11b on August 28 and reported below, and the division’s cause numbers run 0092, 0093, 0094, 0095, 0096, 0097 — six consecutive numbers assigned across eight calendar days, with no gap in the sequence and no number in that run assigned elsewhere.

Three of those six were assigned to Judge Adrogué, two of them on the same day. On Thursday, September 3 the court took three petitions in total: two into the Eleventh Division and one into the Third.

Filed earlier, reported now

Three Business Court petitions belong in this publication’s record and were not in it. Two were filed on August 28 and alerted on August 29, before Issue No. 16 was written; one was filed on August 17 and has now been outstanding across two issues. They are set out here in full, and the reason they were late is set out with them.

For the record

Dockets and calendar

The sequencing anomaly first flagged in Issue No. 15 stands unresolved: the export places a special appearance in Clean Hydrogen Works on September 30, two days after a trial on the merits in the same matter. We print the export as it stands and flag it rather than quietly reordering it. Four settings recorded in the export fell within or just before this issue’s window — the PanOptis motion setting of August 31, the Cobalt Falcon pre-trial conference of September 2, and the Beard pre-trial conference of September 4. What occurred at any of them is not something this issue can state, and it is not stated.

Carried forward

• Re-scoping the alert searches. The saved searches deliver Business Court rows interleaved with a much larger volume of intermediate appellate matters. Reading the notices directly, as this issue does, closes the immediate gap; narrowing the searches to the Business Court divisions remains open and is the durable fix.
• Both feeds need a run. opinions.json is stamped August 18 and docket_alerts.json August 22. Neither lag has affected a published figure, and both are disclosed each week until they are cleared.
• The eight petitions reported above, and the three reported late — all eleven now on the watch list for a first substantive order.
• The pending adviser suits over the Snap One and Couchbase transactions, treated in Issue No. 16 — no signed opinion read in either; cause numbers still to be obtained.
• The Daley claims in CAM Industrial Solutions remain live. No change on the register this week.
• Whether Jackson goes up — petition status still unconfirmed at press.
• A final judgment in Sri Shirdi — fee-ruling status still unconfirmed at press.
• Benjamin Edwards’s monthly Nevada and Texas reincorporation list for August — not confirmed as posted at this issue’s press time; to be cross-checked against the tracker cohort when it arrives.