This is the first post in a series I’m calling “Flipping the Script,” inspired by Episode 162 of the Texas Appellate Law Podcast. The series examines what Texas appellate courts could do to make appellate practice better.
Two Texas Supreme Court transparency tools that genuinely helped practitioners do their jobs have disappeared. Both should come back.
On a recent episode of the Texas Appellate Law Podcast, co-host Jody Sanders and I flipped a question we usually approach from the other direction. Practitioners spend a lot of time thinking about how to make courts’ lives easier. We decided to ask what courts could do to make appellate practice better. The conversation produced a list of more than a dozen issues. This post focuses on one cluster: what the Texas Supreme Court shares with the bar, what it doesn’t, and why that matters beyond mere convenience.
The Court has done several things that genuinely improve appellate practice. Live oral arguments on YouTube. The Friday orders email. A real investment in making its work visible to lawyers and the public. That track record matters, because it proves the Court has the capacity and the will to prioritize transparency when it chooses to. That history makes it harder to understand why two useful tools recently went away.
What the Court Gets Right
Let’s start by giving credit where it’s due.
When the Supreme Court pioneered live streaming of oral arguments through YouTube, it was ahead of most state supreme courts in the country. That decision benefited practitioners, clients, and the public in ways that compound over time. Arguments are archived, accessible from anywhere, and searchable. It’s one of the best transparency decisions the Court could have made.
The Friday orders email is simpler but nearly as valuable. It’s an opt-in subscription that delivers the week’s orders and opinions to your inbox. You don’t have to remember to check the website. You don’t have to build a workflow around monitoring the docket. The Court pushes the information to you. That design choice reflects an understanding that practitioners are busy and that the Court benefits when lawyers stay informed.
A January 2026 procedural memo deserves credit too. When the Court amended the Texas Rules of Appellate Procedure to eliminate the practice of requesting merits briefs before granting a petition for review, it attached a memo explaining how the new process would work. As Don Cruse noted in a recent SCOTXblog post, this was unusual; the Court hadn’t previously used its rule-making process to issue this kind of explanatory document to the bar. The memo covers the new circulation timeline, what happens at initial vote, how the response practice changes, and how extension requests will be handled for merits briefs going forward. For practitioners navigating the new rules, it is genuinely helpful.
The IOP Paper: What It Was and Why It Should Come Back
For years, the Supreme Court published a set of internal operating procedures on its website. The IOP paper became a fixture of appellate CLE programs around the state. It was a plain-language guide to how petitions moved through the Court: how many votes it took to request a response, how cases got placed on the conference agenda, and how the conference calendar related to a petition’s expected timeline. A practitioner with a petition pending could read that paper, look at the conference calendar, and make a reasonable estimate of where their case stood and when to start watching orders closely.
That paper has disappeared from the Court’s website.
The January 2026 memo is the closest thing we have to a replacement, and as I noted above, it’s useful. But it’s non-binding by its own terms. And it was designed to explain the rule changes specifically, not to serve as the kind of comprehensive operational guide the IOP paper provided.
The practical effect of the gap is felt most acutely when you’re advising a client. If you have a petition pending under the new rules, you can piece together a rough picture from the memo, the TRAP, and the conference calendar. But you’re assembling it yourself from multiple sources, and you’re working with a document the Court has already told you it doesn’t consider binding. That’s a meaningful limitation when a client asks what to expect and when.
The ask is straightforward: update the IOP paper to reflect the January 2026 changes and post it on the Court’s website. The memo is a solid foundation. A fuller, updated IOP paper—publicly accessible with a permanent home on the Court’s site—is the right vehicle for the kind of sustained guidance practitioners and clients need. The benefit to the bar is real. The cost to the Court is minimal.
It’s worth noting that the Court has seen some turnover and staffing changes, and that kind of institutional change can disrupt practices that weren’t formally codified anywhere. The gaps I’m describing may reflect that reality as much as any deliberate policy choice. That doesn’t make them less worth addressing. It does suggest the path is straightforward: recommit to what worked, update it for current practice, and put it back where practitioners can find it.
The Pre-Argument Email: Pushing Information That’s Already Public
Until last year, the Supreme Court sent an email before each argument week listing the cases scheduled for argument, brief case summaries, names of counsel, and links to the docket. All of that information was publicly available. The email didn’t disclose anything that wasn’t already on the Court’s website.
What it did was push that information to practitioners rather than requiring them to pull it.
That distinction matters more than it might seem. When you’re managing an active docket, you track the cases you’re in and the issues you care about, but you don’t always catch everything. A pre-argument email surfaces cases you might have missed that directly affect matters you’re already working on. It gives you lead time to watch an argument live or flag it for a client. And when a client wants to know what’s happening with their petition, you can forward something that came directly from the Court—not a third-party newsletter or a docket alert you assembled yourself.
Adam Shniderman has picked up some of this slack through his Substack, 14th and Colorado. He does it well, and he deserves credit for it. But there’s a difference between a practitioner-run newsletter and information pushed directly by the Court. The latter carries institutional weight that a Substack post doesn’t quite replicate.
The ask here is even simpler than the IOP paper: reinstate the pre-argument email service. The information is already compiled. The distribution infrastructure—a Constant Contact list the Court already uses for the Friday orders email—already exists. The marginal cost is minimal.
Why This Matters Beyond Convenience
Although these asks would reduce friction in appellate practice, in the end, neither is really about making the appellate lawyer’s life more comfortable. They’re about the relationship between an institution and the people—lawyers and clients alike—who depend on it.
The Court hasn’t publicly explained why either service disappeared. That gap matters. Practitioners are left to guess whether the change reflects deliberate policy, a resource constraint, or an oversight no one has gotten around to fixing. That uncertainty is its own problem.
Courts derive their authority from both the constitution and public trust. That trust is sustained in part by whether the institution feels accessible and legible to the people who interact with it. Transparency isn’t just good policy; it’s a foundation of institutional legitimacy. When practitioners can track what the Court is doing, advise clients with confidence, and explain the process to non-lawyers in plain terms, the Court benefits as much as the bar does.
The Supreme Court has shown it understands this. The YouTube channel and the Friday orders email didn’t happen by accident. They happened because the Court decided they were worth doing.
The IOP paper and the pre-argument email are worth doing too. The Court has already proven it knows how.