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Rule 166a was recently amended, effective March 1, 2026. For those who have studied the amendments or worked on a summary judgment motion recently, you know that the new rule’s biggest impact on summary-judgment practice is timing. In response to amended Rule 166a, several Travis County civil and family courts issued a new standing order on May 20, 2026. For that reason, this article briefly highlights the new deadlines under Rule 166a and the standing order and then offers some thoughts on avoiding scheduling issues created by the amendments.
Application of the new Rule 166a to pre-existing scheduling orders may threaten your ability to get a summary-judgment ruling before trial. So too could poorly planning a new scheduling order. And while the May 20 standing order eliminates uncertainty in getting a hearing in certain Travis County courts, it too presents challenges.
Rule 166a now provides a very structured path from filing to ruling, with specific time periods for responding, replying, hearing (or submission), and ruling. Calculated from the filing of the movant’s motion, the deadlines are as follows:
If a hearing is set 90 days out from trial and the court rules on the last permissible day, the full period from filing to ruling can stretch to 180 days—nearly 6 months. That substantial increase in lead time is the practical problem the new rule creates.
Getting A Ruling When You Need It
With limited ability to predict (1) how far out a court will set your motion or (2) how long the court will take to rule, you may very well file your motion seemingly early in the case and yet receive a ruling too late to matter. If a ruling does not arrive until after expert discovery, mediation, exhibit preparation, or expensive pretrial work, much of the practical value of summary judgment is gone. Thus, the key question is, when must your motion be filed to have a realistic chance of getting a ruling by the time you need it?
Technically, a hearing and ruling could both be immediate (i.e., a hearing on day 36 with a ruling the same day), resulting in a ruling in 36 days, but such a result is far from certain and perilous to plan on. A moderately safe timeline could be between 96 to 150 days (36-60 days for hearing + 60-90 days to rule). But the safest working assumption is the maximum 180 days from filing to ruling. Not every ruling will take 180 days, but that outer limit should drive scheduling if it’s essential to have a ruling early enough to matter.
Determine the deadline by which you need a ruling, then count back 180 days. If the goal is to have a ruling before mediation, count backward from the mediation date. If the goal is to avoid expert deposition expense or later expert work, count backward from the expert-discovery cutoff or from the point at which major expert expenses begin. From there, the recommendation becomes a calculation. Start with the date by which your client needs a ruling and then count backward from there using a realistic timeline, not an ideal one. If you need a ruling in hand 30 to 45 days before trial, then your motion should generally be filed about 210 to 225 days before trial, assuming a 180-day filing-to-ruling period, to guarantee the ruling is due before the final push of trial preparation. That same approach can be used for other milestones.
As noted above, most rulings will not take the full 180 days allowed, and you can easily adjust the amount of days you prefer to count back when calculating your deadline. Some courts and judges are known to move faster (or slower), and some hearings will be set closer to the 36-day mark than the 90-day deadline. You may have specific reason to believe your judge will rule before 90 days or that a hearing will be quick and easy to obtain. Many factors could cut down the amount of time you feel you need to count back. Whatever your estimated lead time, start with the latest date by which you need a ruling. Nonetheless, be wary; a schedule built around a shorter and more optimistic ruling period risks producing a motion that is technically timely yet strategically late. You may end up drafting, filing, and arguing a motion that is never ruled on before trial or your critical deadline.
Recent Guidance For Participating Travis County Courts
In certain Travis County courts, a recent standing order modifies these considerations significantly. On May 20, 2026, several civil and family courts in Travis County issued a standing order that provides automatic settings for summary judgment hearings based on the filing date of the motion. The participating courts are the 53rd, 126th, 200th, 201st, 261st, 345th, 353rd, 419th, 455th, and 459th. The automatic settings eliminate uncertainty in scheduling or calculating when a motion will be heard, but the order does not address the deadline for a ruling, which could still take up to 90 days. Nonetheless, counting back from a known hearing date makes scheduling easier.
Each automatic setting will consist of a 30-minute, in-person hearing at 2 p.m. in the Travis County Civil and Family Court Facility at 1700 Guadalupe Street, with assignments announced in advance online. Parties cannot ask for a different setting date, which will likely present difficulties for both movants and nonmovants. Movants should carefully consult the automatic setting dates before filing as the only way to remove a setting is to file a notice of withdrawal. Nonmovants are stuck with the date given.
The standing order provides quick, automatically set hearings, but attorneys must be vigilant and proactive to prepare for them. Once filed, each motion for summary judgment is automatically set for hearing based on the applicable filing window. Across the automatic settings provided for 2026 and 2027, most of the filing windows result in a hearing date between 36 and 42 days after the motion is filed. Only a small number of filing windows provide 43 to 49 days’ notice before the hearing. The two filing windows that provide 50 or more days’ notice are the post-holiday settings: November 12-December 2, 2026, for a January 7, 2027 hearing, and November 11-December 1, 2027, for a January 6, 2028 hearing. A party believing their motion requires different handling can contact the applicable court, but the “different handling” available and criteria for obtaining it are unspecified.
The standing order generally gives parties no more than six weeks between the filing of a motion and the in-person hearing. In these courts, the scheduling challenge will be preparing for the hearing on short notice. Nonmovants especially must plan for the possibility of responding to a motion while preparing for a hearing in as few as 36 days.
Impact on Scheduling Orders and Other Deadlines
Dispositive motions will likely be pushed much earlier in scheduling orders. The deadlines that feed summary judgment will likely be impacted too. Think through fact discovery and what you may need to handle earlier in the case. It may be prudent to begin analyzing summary judgment issues even as you draft initial disclosures to help inform what discovery needs to be done, and when.
Rulings are mandatory. No longer may a party file a summary judgment motion and leave it pending with no hearing date. Weak motions may provide less leverage compared to strong motions, which provide more leverage. Mandatory rulings might influence when you file a motion or how closely you set your mediation, settlement, and other pretrial deadlines to a dispositive motion deadline.
While the new Rule 166a gives attorneys a clearer timetable, it also forces earlier planning. In Travis County, the court you are in will play a major role in scheduling. You will get the most out of the new summary judgment rules by treating dispositive deadlines as a scheduling issue at the beginning of the case, not as a filing issue near the end.
