The Hilltop Docket

Issue No. 18 · Monday, September 14, 2026 · Week in review · Covering September 6 – September 12, 2026.

The register moved. For three issues this publication reported nothing above 2026 Tex. Bus. 60, signed on August 17; the register now carries 2026 Tex. Bus. 62, signed September 4 — and it is a jurisdictional opinion. In Parker v. Lynzara-Austin Real Estate Management the Fourth Division held that it could not hear a suit to put three Texas partnerships into a liquidating receivership, because a district court in Kendall County had already put those same partnerships into receivership in 2018 and, under a provision of the Business Organizations Code that predates the Business Court, that court holds them exclusively for as long as the receivership lasts. The dispute was commercial and the claims arose under the Business Organizations Code, which no party disputed. Neither fact mattered. A court can be exactly the right kind of court and still have no power over the thing in front of it.

2026 Tex. Bus. 62 · Parker v. Lynzara-Austin Real Estate Management

The underlying quarrel is old and local. Since 2012 the Parker and Shalit interests have been litigating in Kendall County over the Tapatio Springs golf resort and the real-estate and utility partnerships around it. In 2018 the 451st District Court of Kendall County placed the relevant entities into receivership, and that receivership is still running — the court entered final judgment in the main case earlier this year, a severed portion is on review at the Texas Supreme Court, and the receiverships have been extended until the appeals are exhausted. ¶¶2–4

In 2026 the plaintiffs opened a second front. They filed in the Business Court’s Fourth Division seeking appointment of a liquidating receiver over three of those same partnerships, plus dissolution, winding up and termination — relief the Kendall County court had already declined to give them, choosing instead to extend the existing receivership. ¶¶4–5 The defendants challenged subject-matter jurisdiction. The court granted the plea by written order signed August 31 and issued this opinion explaining why on September 4. ¶7

The statute the case turns on is short, and the court quotes it:

“A court that appoints a receiver under this subchapter for the property or business of a domestic entity has exclusive jurisdiction over the domestic entity and all of its property, regardless of where the property is located.”

Tex. Bus. Orgs. Code § 11.408(b), quoted at 2026 Tex. Bus. 62, ¶19

Three steps carry the holding, and each one closes a door the plaintiffs tried.

First, Chapter 11 is jurisdictional, not venue. Sections 11.402(b) and 11.314 vest the power to appoint a receiver and to order an involuntary winding-up in a district court in the county of the partnership’s registered office or principal place of business; Section 11.401 adds that a receiver may be appointed for a domestic entity “only as provided for and on the conditions set forth in this code.” The court rejected the argument that Section 11.314 is non-jurisdictional, reasoning that the Code uses jurisdiction and venue as distinct terms and the Legislature is presumed to have chosen each deliberately. ¶¶16–17

Second, the general receivership statute yields. Section 64.001 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code says broadly that “a court of competent jurisdiction may appoint a receiver.” The court held it cannot override Chapter 11’s specific grants, citing a line of Texas authority running back to 1974 for the proposition that the general receivership statutes furnish no alternative basis to appoint a receiver in a different county. ¶¶24–25 A contractual designation of Bexar County as the place of performance did not help either: Section 15.035 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code is a permissive venue provision and says nothing about subject-matter jurisdiction. ¶26

Third — and this is the part with reach beyond these partnerships — Chapter 25A’s concurrency carve-in does not save it. The Business Court does have concurrent jurisdiction over certain “actions in which a district court has exclusive jurisdiction.” The court’s answer was that Section 11.408 is not built that way: it makes the exclusivity attach to a court that appoints a receiver — any court — and it runs to the entities and their property rather than to a category of action. The Texas Supreme Court has long held that receivership exclusivity disables even courts of coordinate jurisdiction while the receiver holds the property. ¶¶28–29 And in any event Kendall County sits in the Sixth Administrative Judicial Region, outside the Business Court’s operating divisions, so there was no concurrent jurisdiction to derive from it. ¶¶14, 30

Because the plaintiffs, invited to elect a transfer under Section 25A.006, did not specify a court, the claims were dismissed without prejudice rather than transferred. ¶31 The court did not reach the defendants’ amount-in-controversy argument or their alternative plea in abatement. ¶32

The internal contrast the opinion sets up

The same division reached the opposite result earlier this year. In Kampmann v. Smith, 2026 Tex. Bus. 42, a suit for dissolution, the Fourth Division held that because the entities’ registered office and principal place of business were in Bexar County, the court with power to wind them up was “a Bexar County district court — or this court, exercising concurrent jurisdiction.” ¶18 Read together, the two opinions draw the line cleanly: Chapter 11 locates winding-up jurisdiction by the entity’s county, and the Business Court shares it where that county is inside an operating division — unless a receiver is already appointed, in which case Section 11.408(b) hands the whole entity to the appointing court and sharing stops.

Why this is an architecture problem

It would be easy to file Parker under receivership practice and move on. That understates it. The holding is a consequence of how Texas chose to build a business court, and the choice is visible when the Texas statute is set beside the Delaware provision that does the same work.

The difference visible on the face of the two provisions is where each one puts the appointing court. Delaware names it: the Court of Chancery, one statewide court of equity. Texas does not name a court at all — it describes one, by the entity’s county, which resolves to any of the district courts of 254 counties depending on where the entity sits.

That difference is what gives Section 11.408(b) its bite here. An appointing-court exclusivity rule has to identify some court to vest exclusivity in; where the statute names a single forum, the rule allocates nothing, and where the statute points at whichever district court the entity’s county supplies, the rule can land on a court other than the one a litigant wants. This publication has not surveyed Delaware’s exclusivity doctrine and makes no claim about how Delaware would resolve a comparable collision; the point here is confined to what the two texts do with the location of the appointing court.

Texas distributed the same power across the district courts of 254 counties, by entity location, in a code enacted long before anyone contemplated a specialized commercial court. The Business Court arrived in 2024 as an overlay — concurrent jurisdiction, a dollar threshold, a defined list of action types, and an operating footprint that does not yet cover the whole state. Set an exclusivity rule written for the old architecture on top of the new one and you get Parker: a commercial dispute of the exact type the Business Court was built for, defeated by a 2018 order from a county the Business Court does not reach.

The filing week · ten 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.

Three with named parties readers may recognize

Three of the ten name parties that readers of this publication are likely to recognize by name: EOG Resources, Inc. v. CML Exploration, LLC (26-BC03B-0034, 3rd Div., Sweeten, Other Civil); CenterPoint Energy Houston Electric, LLC v. Comcast of Houston, LLC (26-BC11B-0105, 11th Div., Dorfman, Debt/Contract — Other); and Bison Pipeline, LLC and Northern Border Pipeline Company v. Wyoming Interstate Company, LLC (26-BC11A-0104, 11th Div., Adrogué, Debt/Contract — Other).

That is the whole of what this publication can say about them today. The fields above are the of-record metadata and nothing more; what any of these disputes is actually about is not something a case-type field can tell you, none of the three petitions has been read here, and no court has ruled on any of them. They are noted because readers should know they were filed, and each will be treated when there is a ruling to treat.

A clean numbering run

The one structural fact in this week’s intake that can be checked without reading a pleading is the numbering, and this week it checks out in each division that took a filing. The Fourth and Eighth Divisions took none in this window and so are not part of the check.

• Eleventh Division: 0098, 0099, 0100, 0101, 0102, 0103, 0104, 0105 — eight consecutive numbers, eight petitions, no gap. Seven went to 11b and one to 11a. The run picks up directly from 0097, the last Eleventh Division number reported in Issue No. 17.
• First Division: 0076, following 0075 in Issue No. 17.
• Third Division: 0034, following 0033 in Issue No. 17.

Across all three divisions the sequence continues from last week without a single skipped number.

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. No setting recorded in the export fell within this issue’s coverage window of September 6 – 12. The first entry in the table, the Plains Oryx pre-trial conference, is set for this morning; what occurs at it is not something this issue can state, and it is not stated.

Carried forward

• Opinion 61. No entry bearing that number appears on the register. Watched, not speculated about. Correction, September 20. Superseded by the correction above. The register did carry 2026 Tex. Bus. 61 under a heading in which the court mistyped the citation; Dhannani v. Batool is treated in full in Issue No. 19.
• The secondary register channel. Dowd Bennett had not posted TB 62 at this issue’s press time. If the lag persists, a third independent channel is needed so that two-channel confirmation does not degrade into one channel plus a slow one.
• Re-scoping the alert searches. This week’s notices arrived cleanly divisioned and required no manual triage, but the saved searches remain broadly scoped and the durable fix is still open.
• Staged feed versus published feed. The staged opinions.json is stamped August 18 and omits TB 62; the feed serving the live site resolves to 124 opinions through TB 62. Which is canonical, and what reconciles them, is open and is the first thing to settle before either is relied on. Correction, September 20. Settled since press time. The feed serving the live site is canonical; the staged mirror is retired. Issue No. 19 records the disposition under “For the record.”
• Both staged feeds need a run. opinions.json is stamped August 18; docket_alerts.json is stamped August 22. Both are disclosed each week until cleared.
• The ten petitions reported above — on the watch list for a first substantive order, with EOG Resources, CenterPoint and Bison Pipeline flagged for early treatment.
• The eleven petitions reported in Issue No. 17 — no first substantive order read in any of them this week.
• Whether Parker is refiled in Kendall County, or an appeal is taken from the dismissal — nothing on the record at press time.
• 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.
• 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.