A while back we expressed some puzzlement about why the statewide 15th Court of Appeals was receiving cases outside of its statutory mandate by way of docket equalization. Yesterday, for example, the court issued an opinion in a health care liability action brought by two doctors against a hospital in San Angelo. It also handed down a decision in a case between a dog-boarding facility and a Houston couple who left their dog at the facility with unfortunate results for the pet. Getting back to its own business, the court issued an important and complex insurance coverage decision in a case involving the Texas Association of School Boards Risk Management Fund and a junior college.
In each of these cases, the court ruled within a year of the filing date , and much faster than from the date that full briefing was complete. This is what we have come to expect from this court: prompt and efficient justice, predictability, and, most importantly for parties, significant relief from the cost of waiting two or years for an intermediate appellate decision. Given that one of the court’s primary duties is deciding disputes in which a governmental entity is a party, every day saved in transaction costs associated with the passage of time between an appeal and a decision produces savings for taxpayers who ultimately foot the bill for the litigation.
That is precisely why we are concerned that the court is called on to divert its attention from cases with statewide significance to local disputes from San Angelo and Houston. It appears to us that if docket equalization really is the reason for doing this, we can’t help but think that enough slack exists in courts of appeals around the state to absorb the overflow. After all, this was true before the creation of the 15th court, and if the 15th court went away tomorrow, it would still be true.
Whatever the reason for treating the statewide court of appeals the same as the rest, we have a serious concern that an increasing volume of non-statutory cases could slow down the court, lengthen the time of decision, and produce exactly the opposite result from that which the Legislature intended. The same would be true if, for example, if the Business Court’s jurisdiction got expanded so much that it became hardly distinguishable from a civil trial court.
But what prevents that from happening is the Legislature’s exclusive control over the court’s jurisdiction. We simply don’t understand why the same thing seems not to apply to the 15th Court. Similar to the Business Court, the Legislature has specifically prescribed the court’s jurisdiction. In fact, the Legislature established both courts at the same time for the purpose of putting high stakes cases involving governmental entities and sophisticated business entites in a court that could dedicate itself exclusively to hearing and resolving those disputes without getting caught up in all the other types of disputes trial and appellate courts deal with every day. Treating the 15th Court as simply another court of appeals, in our view, entirely defeats its purpose.
