Citizens raised concerns as early as 2015 about financial management at the Seay Tennis Center, a Highland Park ISD facility. In 2019, HPISD retained attorney Bryan Neal to investigate alleged financial misconduct there; Neal in turn hired accounting firm Whitley Penn, which produced a report on the Center's financial operations and recommendations going forward. The report was never published or provided to the public. When citizens continued raising questions in 2021, Texas Public Policy Foundation sought the report under the Texas Public Information Act; HPISD withheld it, asserting attorney-client privilege because the investigation had been routed through counsel.
TPPF filed suit seeking a writ of mandamus compelling disclosure (the TPIA provides for this as a trial-court cause of action, not an original appellate proceeding). Following a bench trial, the 14th Judicial District Court of Dallas County denied TPPF's petition. The Fifth Court of Appeals affirmed, applying this Court's In re City of Georgetown, 53 S.W.3d 328 (Tex. 2001), which reads the TPIA's reference to "other law" as incorporating the Texas Rules of Evidence (and thus the attorney-client privilege) wholesale. Justice Lewis concurred separately, calling on the Supreme Court to review the case. No motion for rehearing or en banc review was sought. The Supreme Court granted TPPF's petition, with oral argument set for October 8, 2026 at SMU Dedman School of Law.
Petitioner (Texas Public Policy Foundation): In re City of Georgetown was wrongly decided and strays from the TPIA's plain text and its command that the Act be liberally construed in favor of disclosure; the Legislature never acquiesced to that reading. Overruling it would promote efficiency, fairness, and judicial legitimacy, and wouldn't meaningfully hinder governments from seeking legal advice. In the alternative, the privilege exception should be narrowed: it protects legal advice, not the factual investigative work product routed through a lawyer, and the privilege ultimately belongs to the public rather than to public servants. Even under existing law, HPISD waived any privilege when a senior official publicly disclosed the report's conclusions to the district's own benefit.
Respondent (Highland Park ISD): Georgetown's reading of "other law" to include the Rules of Evidence is correct and the Legislature has had roughly 25 years to override it and hasn't, which itself confirms the interpretation. Petitioner's efficiency, fairness, and legitimacy arguments about overruling the case are overstated, and eviscerating the privilege here would hinder every governmental body's ability to obtain candid legal advice, not just HPISD's. TPPF's proposed case-by-case balancing test gives courts and litigants no workable standard, and its waiver argument rests on a strained reading of one email; in any event the privilege belongs to the District's Board of Trustees, not to any individual employee who might have spoken about the report.
Yes. The petition argues this presents a question of statewide jurisprudential importance under Tex. Gov't Code Sec. 22.001(a): if a government body can convert core public records into privileged material merely by inserting a lawyer as an intermediary, the TPIA effectively stops applying to governmental investigations altogether. It also notes that a justice on the panel below expressly called on the Supreme Court to take up the case.
open-records, civil-procedure
Petition for Review (Tex. R. App. P. 53.1) -- reaching the Supreme Court through an ordinary appeal from a trial-court TPIA mandamus suit (the writ-of-mandamus label describes the trial-level cause of action under the Act, not an original appellate proceeding, so Petitioner/Respondent terminology applies at this stage). Granted; set for oral argument October 8, 2026. Not yet decided.
None
Every document below opens on the official Texas courts site (search.txcourts.gov) — nothing is hosted here.