The Texas State Bar has its own website with useful information.  There are links for almost everything you can want.  Join and access sections, pay dues, or search for a Texas lawyer.  If you are a member of the Texas bar, you can customize the page for even easier entry and search.

An excellent research search service is provided by the State Bar of Texas  for Texas Lawyers, allowing them to do free legal research on cases, statutes, and court rules.  Free legal research for Texas Bar members is entered from the Texas MyBarPage.

If you are familiar with the peculiar Texas statutory arrangement, you may find it most convenient to enter statutory research by browsing through the various "codes" to find what you are looking for.  If so use the Texas legislative page entry to the statutes.

The Texas attorney's MyBarPage also links directly into TexasBarCLE.com which has a large list of courses and articles that can be purchased and downloaded.   The is the place for a Texas lawyer to get continuing legal education. Texas State Bar Continuing Legal Education.  -- use it to start Texas Research the easy way if you do not already have a basic knowledge of where you want to go in the Texas cases and statutes.  Search over 3,000 CLE course articles on line, free, for what interests you.  (On some you can preview the  article's table of contents) Then, purchase for $29 and download it. Or, for an annual fee of about $300, you may download all the articles you wish. The ONLINE LIBRARY is updated as new courses are presented.

TexasBar.com/ethics is sort of a one-stop location for Texas legal ethics resources, including conduct rules and ethics opinions.

Tx-Laws.com has a good entry to search for case law in Texas.  It also is maybe the best way to get to the rules of procedure.  You have to register to use the site, but registration is free.

 Another page of this site has links to the appeals courts and thence to the state courts of Texas.

The Texas Ethics Reporter page presented by the University of Houston Law Center, O'Quinn Law Library, is a great place to do legal research on ethics in Texas.

The Texas Young Lawyers Association (bless them) had a project of publishing a book on the Texas legal ethics opinions and law.  Titled as "Texas Lawyers' Professional Ethics" and available through the TesasBarCLE, the softbound book is 526 pages in the 2007th (4th) edition.

An index to the Texas Professional Ethics Opinions  is now published periodically by the Texas Center for Legal Ethics and Professionalism. Those who have, as we do, the 2004 Ethics Course CD from the Texas Center for Legal Ethics and Professionalism can look at the full text of the opinions up to # 542 of May 2002 in that way. (The CD also contains the 2002 version of the Rules of Professional Conduct.) Copies of the Ethics Opinions can be ordered from the Texas Center for Legal Ethics and Professionalism (P.O. Box 12487, Austin, TX 78711-2487; phone-512/463-1463 x 2161 or 1-800-204-2222 x 2161). Information on how to submit a question for an official opinion should be obtained through the Chief Disciplinary Counsel's Office at 1-877-953-5535. .

Texas Ethics Rules of Professional Conduct may be found at the Cornell University web site.

The Corpus Christi Bar Association's website has some good links and articles, although it is not much help in finding particular lawyers in the Corpus Christ area.

For several years the State Bar of Texas maintained a Department of Research & Analysis to provide marketing research for all State Bar departments, committees, and the Board of Directors. The department's activities included conducting statistical surveys of the Bar membership, as well as studies of issues affecting the legal profession, such as economic and demographic trends. The department maintained extensive files of journal and newspaper articles and other publications on issues of importance to the State Bar and the legal profession in general, and utilizes these to answer queries from the membership.

In recent years, to conserve operating funds, the State Bar of Texas cut back on the staff of the Department of Research & Analysis, disbanded the Department as a separate department, but retained certain employees and continued on as "employee functions" several of the same functions as the Department.

Texas Local Rules of court .  A list of all Texas courts that have made these local rules available online.   Included in many of these local rules are the Texas court's position on exchanging exhibits prior to trial, dress codes, sample and form orders, how to set a hearing, and other various rules of decorum and procedure.

Some courts in Texas, state and federal, have access to various amounts of dockets and rules information.  This link takes you to those court dockets and rules.

Experts and their income: Pretrial discovery of a witness' accounting and financial records, solely for the purpose of impeachment, may be denied. In Re Weir, a 2005 Texas Appeals Court case, again illustrates the question and its resolution. The case involved an expert witness who fought a trial court's order to produce federal income tax returns.   During a deposition, the opposing parties (the plaintiffs) asked expert witness Weir what percentage of his income came from litigation in the last two years.  The trial court ordered Weir to give deposition testimony on his litigation-related income for 2002-2004, as well as the percentage of the total income this litigation-related income represented. The appeals court reversed. The Texas Supreme Court has expressed reluctance to unnecessary discovery of federal income tax returns. The plaintiffs' interests in obtaining discovery solely for impeachment must be weighed against the witness' legitimate interest in protecting unrelated financial information.  See generally, Russell v. Young, 452 S.W.2d 434, 436 (Tex. 1970); and Olinger v. Curry, 926 S.W.2d 832 (Tex. App.--Fort Worth 1996, orig. proceeding).

When asked to reconstruct his sources of income for the last year, Weir testified as follows:

"I believe that that falls within the purview of me and the IRS. And that is my position. And then I will tell you the -- my knowledge of my income as it pertains to this case, my rate of income, and my understanding of what I can recollect from my work in litigation as it pertains to matters such as this. I don't feel it's either appropriate or anyone's business, including my wife's, what else I make. "

The appeals court in Weir found that: "The deposition ordered here would not materially benefit the dispute resolution process in this case in view of the information already available to the parties and the trial court concerning this expert witness."

In Re Weir, (Tex.App. Dist.9 06/16/2005) Per curium. 09-05-116 CV

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