This is the sixth and final post in the Flipping the Script series, drawn from Episode 162 of the Texas Appellate Law Podcast. The series examines what Texas appellate courts could do to make appellate practice better.
The first five posts in this series each featured one suggested reform. This one is different. When my co-host Jody Sanders and I recorded Episode 162, we came up with more ideas than I could ever turn into full posts. A handful of them deserved their own treatment, and they got it. But smaller items kept coming up, some from us and some from listeners, and none of them quite carries an entire post on its own.
That doesn’t make them unimportant. Most of these are modest, but put them together, and they’d meaningfully smooth the day-to-day experience of practicing appellate law in Texas. So here they are, gathered in one place.
Case Status Visibility
A listener suggested that courts of appeals add something like a Domino’s Pizza tracker to their websites. I love the idea, even if a literal pizza tracker is a stretch. The point underneath the joke is real. When a client asks how long an opinion will take after submission, the honest answer is some version of “a few weeks, maybe a few months, we just don’t know.” That’s a hard answer to give. And it’s harder still because the lawyer is supposed to know these things.
We don’t always know, because the courts are juggling priorities we can’t see. Criminal cases, parental-termination cases, and accelerated interlocutory appeals all jump the line. From the outside we can’t tell where any given case sits in the mix. I don’t have the solution. But anything that pulls back the curtain even a little would help the lawyer advise the client, and it could help lawyers manage client expectations and reduce uncertainty about where a case stands.
Opinion Subscriptions, Court by Court
The Texas Supreme Court makes this easy. You can opt into an email list and get a weekly note with the orders and opinions. It works the way signing up for anything online should work. There was a time you could do the same thing court by court at the intermediate level, subscribing to the orders and opinions from a specific court of appeals as they came out. As far as I can tell, that’s been broken for a few years.
I’d love to see it come back. I don’t want every order from every court. But if I’m practicing in a particular court, getting its output in my inbox is far better than remembering to click through the website. The Business Court belongs on this list too. It’s writing opinions and posting them online, but there’s no email subscription that I’m aware of.
Case Summaries
A related suggestion: courts of appeals should put out short case summaries the way the Supreme Court does. I like it, and you could pair it with the subscription list so each opinion arrives with a paragraph explaining what it’s about and how it came out. The honest hurdle is resources. The Supreme Court’s summaries feed a larger body of work that a justice presents at appellate CLEs, so the effort compounds. At the intermediate level, the demand may be there in the urban courts and thinner in the rural ones. Local practitioners and appellate bars sometimes fill this gap with opinion updates and CLE materials, but real-time summaries straight from the courts would be a nice addition.
Issue Grants and Pre-argument Topics
Two ideas here, one for the Supreme Court and one for the intermediate courts. The prospect of Supreme Court grants on specific issues has been a frequent topic of discussion, but the Court hasn’t signaled any move in that direction. The justices have explained why they’re cautious about it, especially with the new petition process still settling in. Even if issue grants are appropriate only in a subset of cases, those involving multiple petitions seem like one area where they could significantly focus the parties’ briefing and argument preparation.
For the intermediate courts, I’d love to know in advance which topics the panel most wants to hear about at oral argument. In a standard civil appeal with three or four issues and a two-week trial behind it, there’s a lot to prepare. If the court flagged the things it really cares about, I could tailor my time to the conversation the court wants to have—the conversation we’ll end up having anyway. The First Court of Appeals is piloting a related idea: giving each side two minutes of uninterrupted opening time. Pair something like that with a heads-up on topics, and oral argument gets better for everyone.
Sealed Records
Sealed and in-camera materials get handled differently by different clerks, court reporters, and courts. That inconsistency creates headaches at every step: preparing the record, getting it to the court of appeals, and accessing it as the party that needs to. Some standardization would help. The good news is that the Supreme Court Advisory Committee is studying Rule 76a, so there may be movement here. A word of caution for trial lawyers in the meantime: think carefully about what and how you seal. An entire motion, specific pages, individual exhibits, line by line. There are reasons to do each, and the choice you make in the trial court follows the case all the way up.
Record Costs
Every clerk and court reporter sets a fee schedule, and those schedules vary, sometimes across counties. There’s no standardized cost, which makes it hard to give a client an estimate. From an access-to-justice standpoint, and from a basic predictability standpoint, some kind of standardized structure would help. I know that’s a heavy lift and probably needs a legislative fix. Clerks rely on revenue generated from records, and court reporters have a strong voice in this state. But reporter’s-record costs can be very high, and that’s something the appellant has to pay in full for the appeal to proceed. Flagging the issue is worthwhile even if the fix is years off.
Bonus Fix: Filing the Mandamus Record
We didn’t discuss this one in the episode. It’s mechanical, and it involves the kind of friction you only feel once you’re in it. Mandamus is different from an ordinary appeal in a basic way: the relator assembles the record. Under Rule 52.7, that’s the relator’s job, and the record can get big fast.
Here’s the issue: The Texas e-filing system caps individual document uploads at 25 MB. When a mandamus record runs past that, you have to split it into parts. For a big record, that can mean several. So you’re either planning around the file-size cap in advance—if you think about it—or absorbing the extra time and frustration when filing. PDF tools can shrink a file, but compression usually costs you quality, and whether that trade-off is workable depends on how clean the originals were. None of this is the kind of thing rules committees tend to think about. But upload limitations can create stress for the relator, and a higher cap or a smoother path for oversized records would take it away. The filing system should accommodate the record sizes that modern litigation routinely generates.
That rounds out the series. Five posts gave a full reform proposal its own treatment; this one gathers the rest. None of these items is dramatic on its own. Together, they’re the kinds of incremental improvements that make a functioning system easier to navigate for lawyers, clients, and courts alike.