I don’t know where to begin
The first week, in order. Find your cause number, read the docket, calendar every date, and get help.
Nobody teaches you how to stand up in a courtroom.
If you are representing yourself in a Texas civil case, the hard part usually is not the law. It is the hundred small procedures nobody explains.
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Where are you?
I need to file something
What the clerk needs, how e-filing works, and what has to be redacted — including the name of anyone who was a minor when the suit was filed.
I have to be in court
How to address the judge, what to say, what costs you credibility, and the two questions to ask before you leave.
I got an order
Which paragraphs actually bind you, how to find every date and obligation in it, and what to do if the signed order does not match what the judge said.
The guides
One procedure each. Read them in any order.
Before the hearing
- Reading your own docket what has actually happened in your case
- Getting a document filed and the rule that says a clerk may not refuse it
- How to e-file format, signatures, redaction
- Asking for more time why an oral request usually fails
- Exhibits and evidence getting a document admitted
- Building an exhibit binder copies, numbering, redaction
On the day, and after
- What happens at a hearing the order of the morning
- Talking to the judge forms of address and the phrases that work
- The court reporter takes the record down on request — if nobody asks, there may be nothing to appeal from
- Questioning a witness direct and cross are opposite jobs
- When the other side has a lawyer what they may and may not do
- Reading an order what it actually requires, and by when
What this is
The procedural knowledge lawyers absorb in their first year and nobody ever writes down. There is a lot of writing about what Texas law says, and very little about what you physically do on the day.
What this is not
Not legal advice, and not a substitute for a lawyer. No licensed Texas attorney writes, reviews, or approves this material. We say so plainly in how we write this. If you can get help, get it; start here lists where to look.
A site about the courtroom, not about your particular case. The procedure is the same whether you are defending an eviction, answering a debt suit, or standing up in a family matter: what the clerk needs, how a document gets into evidence, how a hearing runs, what the reporter takes down.
These pages do not cover the substantive law of any of those — what you are entitled to, what the other side must prove, what a judge may order. The question box goes further than the pages do: where no guide covers your question, it answers from the Texas statutes themselves, quoting them, saying plainly where the text stops answering, and labelling the reply so you can see that nobody here read those sections first.
Get told when a guide goes up
New guides and corrections. Monthly at most, and the list is not shared with anyone.