About the publication
A short weekly briefing on what happened in the Texas Business Court — the new state court that handles big corporate disputes — written so business readers can follow what matters without legal training.
About · Editorial backstory
The Hilltop Docket exists because the Texas Business Court deserves a primary-source, practitioner-grade weekly chronicle.
Published by the SMU Corporate Governance Initiative at SMU Cox School of Business and SMU Dedman School of Law. Editorial responsibility rests with the Executive Director; the institutional disclaimer at the foot of every page applies.
What this is
In plain terms. When two companies sue each other in Texas over governance disputes, mergers, fiduciary duties, or major commercial contracts, the case now goes to a specialized court called the Texas Business Court (opened September 2024). The Hilltop Docket reads every ruling that court issues, summarizes it in lay language, and explains why it matters for companies, boards, and investors. We publish one issue each week.
A concrete example. When Greystar Real Estate Partners sued its insurance company over a covered-loss dispute, the court ruled on whether a key motion could be heard. The decision moved the case forward by months and clarified how the new court handles procedural questions. In our weekly issue, you would see (1) what the case is about, (2) what the judge decided, (3) what it means for similar disputes going forward — with a direct link to the underlying order on the court’s public website.
Who reads it. General counsel and outside counsel tracking disputes that might land in the Texas Business Court. Boards of directors at Texas-incorporated companies. Investors trying to understand the legal environment in Texas. Journalists, academics, and policymakers studying how the new court is shaping commercial law in real time.
What it is not. Not legal advice. Not advocacy. Not commentary that takes sides for or against either party. The publication exists to make a new court’s output legible to people who do not spend their days reading court orders.
Editorial standards
Every issue of The Hilltop Docket is published under these three rules. They appear at the top of the inaugural edition and on the subscribe landing page; they are repeated here because the discipline of a publication of record is in the rules it commits to in advance.
Every claim of fact is anchored in a primary source: a court opinion, a public filing, an enacted statute, an official transcript. Footnote URLs target primary sources, not commentary. Practitioner blogs may appear as scholarship cites but not as URL targets.
Case-level work in each edition is structured to permit but not require AI assistance. No opinion summary ships without a human editor having read both the court’s order and the publication’s treatment of it. This is consistent with the SMU CGI gold-standard mandate and remains true for as long as The Hilltop Docket publishes under the SMU CGI imprint.
The Hilltop Docket has no financial or advisory relationship with any litigant before the Texas Business Court. If that ever changes, disclosure on Page One.
Masthead
Editor
Shane Goodwin, PhD, LLM
Executive Director, SMU Corporate Governance Initiative · Professor of Practice, Department of Finance, SMU Cox School of Business · Adjunct Professor, SMU Dedman School of Law.
Editorial review
SMU CGI Research Staff
Case-level review by SMU CGI research staff with input from SMU Dedman Law students.
A consolidated contributor masthead with named editors, research staff, and student contributors will appear here as the publication grows. Contributors are listed publicly only with their consent.
Colophon
Opinion corpus. The corpus is scraped from the Texas Business Court’s public website on a regular cadence and verified against the court’s sequential per-year citation scheme (e.g., 2026 Tex. Bus. 29). We hold PDFs of every opinion in the corpus and verify completeness by per-year sequence-set comparison.
Docket activity. New-case filings, docket entries, and hearings are surfaced through saved-search subscriptions to re:SearchTX, the Texas Office of Court Administration’s records portal. The bot inbox receives subscriptions, which are parsed by an automated pipeline that runs on a thirty-minute cadence.
Editorial layer. The live monitor is the data substrate. The publication is the editorial layer above it. Every issue is composed by a human editor against the underlying primary-source material; the pipeline informs but does not author the editorial work.
Typography. The Hilltop Docket sets in Source Serif 4 for display and body text, with JetBrains Mono for citations, docket numbers, and case captions. The publication’s design tokens are documented in the SMU CGI build manual and shared with the umbrella research site at smucgi.org.
Distribution. Editions are distributed by email through Buttondown. Subscribers may consume each edition by email or by visiting the archive at smucgi.org/hilltop-docket/archive/. The full opinion corpus and live monitor are available at smucgi.org/research/texas-business-court/opinions/.
Citation, corrections, contact
Cite an issue of The Hilltop Docket by issue number, date, and section. For example: The Hilltop Docket, No. 1 (May 20, 2026), From the Bench (treating Plains Pipeline v. Arrowhead Gulf Coast Holdings, 2026 Tex. Bus. 29). Case summaries themselves are reportorial; the underlying court orders are the authoritative source.
Corrections to published material are made promptly. Send corrections to hilltopdocket@smucgi.org. We track corrections internally and publish material corrections in the following edition’s closing section.
If you are aware of a TBC opinion, filing, hearing, or development that should be on our radar, write to hilltopdocket@smucgi.org. Counsel of record who wish to flag procedural developments are particularly welcome.
Academic and educational use is permitted with standard attribution. For broader reprints or syndication inquiries, contact hilltopdocket@smucgi.org.
How we work
We borrow the disciplines that make Delaware-side reporting trustworthy: primary sources, human review, declared conflicts, and a refusal to take paid placement on coverage.
01 / Primary sources
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
Per-opinion entries follow Bluebook 21st short-form conventions; sequential per-year citations are preserved (e.g., 2026 Tex. Bus. 29 follows 28).
03 / Human review
AI assists with first-pass extraction. Every published characterization is read against the underlying opinion PDF; mischaracterizations are corrected at the source with a dated note.
04 / Independence & conflicts
SMU CGI is funded institutionally. The Hilltop Docket accepts no paid placement and declares conflicts in the closing section of each issue. Editorial policy.
