Inside Texas’ new Business Court

The Dallas outpost of the Texas Business Court is tucked in a nondescript corner of that one SMU building that’s across the highway from the rest of campus. Inside, though, Judge Bill Whitehill is trying to do something extraordinary. 

“We were created by the Legislature with the backing of the Governor to be bold, to be different, to provide a solution to businesses that have problems that are different than the typical case down at the district courthouse,” Whitehill said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News Aug. 6. “The Business Court generally, and in Division One me, has taken that really to heart to provide a product that is competitive in the marketplace.”

Whitehill joined the court as one of its inaugural 10 judges in 2024 and was recently appointed to another two-year term. He was a Justice on the Texas Fifth District Court of Appeals and before that a 33-year associate and partner at Gardere Wynne Sewell, now known as Foley & Lardner. Out of college, he was briefly a commercial banker before deciding to go to law school, but the experience still helps inform his perspective on business matters today. 

The Texas Business Court was designed to give complex business litigation a different venue than the district courts, which handle thousands of cases and can lack the time and subject matter expertise businesses crave to resolve disputes. Many other states have business courts, but the Texas Business Court is playing a key role in Texas’ effort to lure corporate domiciles from Delaware by competing with the First State’s preeminent Court of Chancery. Unlike the Court of Chancery and its century of history and case law, though, the Texas Business Court, which recently got its 500th filing, is leaning into the frontierism of its situation as judges bring new perspectives and approaches to the state judiciary.

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Whitehill’s space certainly doesn’t look like the typical courtroom. You won’t find a bench anywhere. There are two small meeting rooms off the lobby, the Longhorn Conference Room and the Mustang Conference Room, named for where Whitehill got his undergraduate degree, the University of Texas, and where he went to law school, Southern Methodist University.

The main room he likens to a boardroom. A long modular table sits in the center of the room with pocket copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; Whitehill’s bench is an office chair at the head of the table. The fringe-trimmed flags and seal of the court behind the chair are a few of the things in the court that weren’t his idea.

“I’m trying to create that boardroom environment in here, and to get people that at one point in time worked together to sit across the table from each other and accept the fact that they have to work together to resolve this business problem, and that it’s their problem, it’s not their lawyer’s case,” he said. “The Office of Court Administration wanted me to have some trappings of the courtroom, and so we do just to remind people that we’re really a court, but I believe that my authority comes from the position I hold and how I treat people. It doesn’t need to come from symbols like benches and robes.”

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During one hearing observed by The Dallas Morning News, Whitehill demonstrated less the statue of Antonin Scalia and more the firmness of a teacher who asks questions he knows you know the answer to. When the roundtable of lawyers tries to stand up and greet him in a way befitting the title “Your Honor,” he tells them to stay seated. Dialogue flows naturally between parties, or as naturally as a court could allow anyway: “Deadline’s up to you,” Whitehill tells them, “You know your cases better than I do.”

He has little patience for wasting time. After rattling off a list of prospective trial dates sans the year, he tacks on that they’re all in 2027. “No ‘2028, 2029’, none of that foolishness,” he says. 

“We try very hard to squeeze as much cost and time out of the process as possible. I think the way we handle discovery in a big case can save the parties millions of dollars, and most of the time, the vast majority of the time, the lawyers get it,” Whitehill said. “You’ll hear me say, I don’t believe in discovery motions. Usually, they’re not necessary if people will actually talk to each other, and if that doesn’t work, just call [court manager] Susan [Fox-Bowen], and we’ll have a conference in less than 24 hours. That works the vast majority of the time.

“As a result of the way we handle the preliminary scheduling conference, I’ve had at least two cases where the parties left and settled the case, and so if that’s happening, then I’m doing my job. It’s my job to help parties solve their problems, not to be a hard-nosed judge,” he said. 

Whitehill decorated the space himself, a physical monument to the freedom Texas Business Court judges are given to lead their venues. Whitehill’s court is all warm wood and Southwestern Americana, scattered with things meaningful to him and his career. A file cabinet he and his wife bought when he started law school, a whiskey bottle from his grandfather, mementos from when his son lived in Italy. 

A Golden Gloves trophy came from an old client.

“Back in 1988, I got slugged in a deposition, and my client thought it was so funny, he had that little trophy made up.”

“The one thing in here that seems to generate the most emotive response is the briefcase. That was my dad’s,” Whitehill said. “He came home from work every day and set it down and changed clothes, and we’d go throw the football, go throw the baseball, or wrestle, so I pick that up and leave that there because I see it every day; it reminds me of my dad.”

Whitehill has a philosophy for everything, from hand-tied bow-ties – they can’t be too neat lest people think they’re machine tied – to the guiding principle that he’s not here to make laws but implement existing law to make “correct” not “right” decisions. 

“I will do whatever I can, within the law, obviously, to help people resolve their problems efficiently. Their time and money will be better spent going about their business than fighting a lawsuit,” he said. “After a combined 40-plus years of private practice and being on the Court of Appeals, there won’t be a kind of case that will come before me that I didn’t have. I know how cases get derailed and delayed and overly expensive, and so I’m trying to avoid those traps and pitfalls.”