Texas Business Court Judge Sets Bar for Accepting Removed Cases

Texas’ business courts must accept cases removed from district courts so long as they aren’t older than 30 days and meet other requirements, a judge ruled Monday.

The ruling potentially opens the courts to acts of forum shopping by parties upset by a ruling from the initial court, but “Texas law has mechanisms for addressing it,” Judge Melissa Andrews of the Business Court, Third Division, wrote in the order. Andrews will hold an injunction hearing Tuesday.

The decision appears to bless clever lawyering from SafeLease Insurance Services, a plaintiff that removed its suit to Andrews’ court on Jan. 29—with an amended petition— after it failed to get an injunction from a district court.

SafeLease’s last-minute removal request tests the boundaries of the state’s business courts system, which opened in September as a way to streamline complex, high-dollar disputes that tend to bog down district court dockets.

Several defendants who license software to self-storage facilities urged Andrews to block SafeLease’s removal, saying the clock had expired because SafeLease knew about the business court’s jurisdiction more than 30 days before the attempted shift.

But that argument fails because the clock begins at the filing of the suit, which happened within 30 days of the removal, rather than the moment a party gains knowledge about the business court’s jurisdiction, she said.

“If that were the case, the removal window could begin and end before a plaintiff files suit—even for other parties,” Andrews wrote.

She added, “A defendant with knowledge of the jurisdictional facts would have no opportunity to timely remove a case if the plaintiff waited more than 30 days to file suit.”

Andrews also ruled business courts can try cases that involve non-monetary relief if the amount in controversy is at least $5 million—the minimum threshold to try a case in the business courts.

“Both the Texas Supreme Court and this Court have held that actions in which damages were not sought nevertheless could satisfy jurisdictional amount-in-controversy minimums,” Andrews wrote.

SafeLease is represented by Stone Hilton and Yetter Coleman LLP. The storage facilities are represented by Porter Hedges LLP.

The case is SafeLease Ins. Serv. LLC v. Storable, Inc., Tex. Bus. Ct., No. 25-BC03A-0001, 2/10/25.