Financial Services—The SCOTX Report

24-0149·Mandamus

A trial court may order alternative security to supersede a money judgment under Rule of Appellate Procedure 24.1(a)(4) even for a judgment debtor whose net worth is $10 million or more; Rule 24.2(e), which requires alternative security for debtors under that threshold, is not the exclusive source of the authority, so the court of appeals erred in holding alternative security categorically unavailable.
The Court found no abuse of discretion in the trial court's $147 million net-worth finding, which rested on crediting one side's valuation experts, and noted that tendering the very property whose valuation drove a $25 million bond generally will be adequate alternative security absent a particular need.

24-0759·Other

Answering a Fifth Circuit certified question, the Court held that when a commercial loan provides for periodic principal payments, Finance Code § 306.004(a)'s requirement to compute the interest rate "using the actuarial method" means the maximum lawful interest must be calculated from the declining principal balance for each payment period, not from the total loan proceeds.
The Legislature deliberately changed the text from an "equal parts" method to the "actuarial method," a term with a well-established meaning, so the older Nevels and Tanner decisions, which concerned interest-only loans and prepaid interest, do not control.

24-1039·Petition For Review

A court of appeals erred by ruling sua sponte that a guarantors' summary-judgment challenges were not preserved because certain evidence was missing from the appellate record, when both sides agreed the documents were on file for the trial court, since Rule 166a requires evidence to be on file at the hearing, not physically attached to the motion.
Where a court of appeals is unsure whether documents attached to another pleading apply to the motion under review, it should ask the parties to clarify or consider the on-file evidence and reach the merits rather than find a procedural default that no party urged; the case is remanded to decide the unaddressed issues.

24-1057·Petition For Review

The home-equity forfeiture remedy in Article XVI, Section 50(a)(6)(Q)(x) applies only to a lender's breach of constitutionally mandated loan terms, not to every breach of a home equity loan agreement.
A lender that overcharged about $10,000 in interest on a roughly $700,000 line of credit, then tendered the overcharge plus interest, did not forfeit the entire loan amount.

24-1070·Petition For Review

A local government corporation's failure to submit a note and supporting contracts to the Attorney General for examination does not void the financing; the consequence is that the corporation loses the statutory defense of incontestability.
The $17.4 million installment-sale financing did not violate the PID Act's Texas-issuer requirement, so the city and its corporation could not escape repaying the bondholder.

25-0433·Mandamus

Whether a trial court abused its discretion by ordering a party either to produce its contracts and communications with nonparty customers within seven days or be barred from offering evidence on that subject at trial, relief the opposing party did not seek until a de novo appeal from an associate judge's order and which was entered without findings.
Whether the trial court could overrule a party's privilege objections to its communications with its former parent company's lawyers before the party made a withholding statement under Rule 193.3, whether parent and subsidiary communications can be privileged, and whether the relator lacks an adequate remedy by appeal.

25-0660·Petition For Review

Whether a party preserves a complaint about the trial court's failure to submit its tendered questions and instructions by tendering them and having the trial court mark them "Refused" and say error is preserved, or must it also object at the charge conference, and whether objecting to a legally invalid damages theory preserves error or the party must also object that the broad-form question improperly mixed damages.
Whether legally sufficient evidence supports a $5 million damages award that petitioner says rests on an unenforceable agreement to negotiate, consequential damages the contract forecloses, hypothetical-bargain lost profits, and causation without expert testimony.