About the publication
A research-grade daily-intelligence publication tracking the Texas Business Court, modeled on the standing publications of record of comparable specialized commercial benches. Edited from SMU Cox and SMU Dedman Law.
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 twice daily 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.
