Montgomery Court Watch

Method

How to read this site

Records, not conclusions. This site shows what public records say and where each record came from. It does not say anyone did anything wrong. Distributions that look unusual have ordinary explanations more often than not: a court created to absorb civil cases will hold a large share of civil cases; a lawyer who practices one kind of law will appear in the courts that hear it.

Court shown is the current court

The District Clerk's index reports where a case sits today. When the 457th District Court opened in 2020 it took civil cases from other courts, so cases filed before 2020 can show the 457th. Comparisons across courts should use the county-wide baseline, which is built the same way.

The 200-row cap

Odyssey returns at most 200 results per search. Every list on this site was pulled in date windows small enough to stay under that cap, then merged and de-duplicated by case number. The provenance line on each page names the windows.

Dispositions are types, not wins

A register of actions records that a judgment, dismissal, nonsuit or default was entered. It often does not say which party prevailed. The outcome tables count disposition types by court. Whether a party "won" is in the judgment itself, which you can open from the case number.

Appointment fees

Under Chapter 36 of the Government Code, clerks report every appointment of an attorney ad litem, guardian, guardian ad litem, mediator or competency evaluator, and every fee approved. The Office of Court Administration publishes the detail statewide. This site filters to Montgomery County and groups by judge and appointee. Fees approved are not fees paid to a judge; they are paid to the appointee.

Campaign finance

District judges file with the Texas Ethics Commission; county officials file with the county elections office. Totals shown are the cover-sheet totals on each report. Contributors and payees are inside the linked PDF.

What this site does not show

It does not show who won a case; it shows the disposition type the clerk recorded and, where the side is known, a direction proxy. It does not show why a donor gave, why a judge appointed someone, or why an attorney's cases sit in one court; the records do not say, and neither does this site. A name appearing in two lists (donor and appointee, vendor and contributor) can happen for reasons unrelated to one another. Nothing here is a finding of improper conduct, and nothing here is a certified copy.

How names are matched

Records are shown under the name the agency used. Two spellings are merged only when a record says they are the same person or firm (a State Bar listing, a filer ID, an address on the report); the alias table is in the case file and every entity page lists the spellings it was seen under. Same-surname matches are never merged. Where a match is uncertain, the record stays separate.

Thresholds

Rates are shown only at 10 or more decided cases; below that the count is shown and the rate is a dash. County-wide baselines sit beside every share. Nothing is ranked.

Anomalies

The Anomalies page applies one stated rule per section to everyone in the records: court share against a case-type-adjusted expectation, ending direction against the court-wide rate, appointment concentration against the bench median, name matches between appointee and contributor lists, vendor and contributor lists, contribution dates near award dates, same-day donor clusters, bench-wide donors, officials giving to officials, shared surnames between judicial officers and attorneys, and filing spikes. Listing thresholds are three standard errors or the stated multiple of the median. A row on that page means the rule matched; it is a place to look, not a finding.

Legal basis

Court dockets, appointment and fee reports, campaign-finance reports, purchasing awards and Commissioners Court minutes are public under the Texas Public Information Act, the Rules of Judicial Administration, the Election Code and the Local Government Code. Home addresses, minors, and sealed, expunged, family, juvenile, guardianship and mental-health matters are not published here.

Where the dockets come from, and where they do not

Docket data on this site comes from the Montgomery County District Clerk's own Odyssey Public Access portal, the Office of Court Administration, the Texas Ethics Commission, mctx.org and Public Information Act responses. Nothing comes from re:SearchTX. Its Terms of Use (copied 2026-09-08) license records "solely for … internal use in the regular course of … business" and bar storing them "in a searchable database accessible to third parties" (§ 2.2(c)) or any "programmatic or bulk data collection" (§ 2.6). Documents a party buys there for a case stay in that case file. Every record here should be verified against the court of record before it is relied on; that is also what re:SearchTX's own § 8.1 tells its users.

Corrections

If a record here differs from the government system, the government system controls. Cite the file name and hash from the Sources page and it will be re-pulled and re-built.