A contractor finishes building a home. The owner dies before paying the final draw. The contractor files a claim against the probate estate, the estate representative rejects it, and the contractor heads to court only to find the courthouse door locked. Not because the claim lacked merit, but because the suit was filed in the wrong court.
Texas probate law has its own procedural rules, and creditors who ignore those rules pay for it. When a probate estate’s personal representative rejects a claim, the Texas Estates Code tells the claimant exactly where to sue. File in the right court within ninety days and the claim stays alive. File in the wrong court and the claim is gone, no matter how strong it is on the merits.
So what happens when a claimant files multiple causes of action in the district court — breach of contract, quantum meruit, lien foreclosure, statutory claims — after a probate representative has rejected the underlying estate claim? Can the claimant save any of those theories by arguing they were never part of the rejected claim? And does the doctrine of dominant jurisdiction let the district court abate the case rather than dismiss it?
The Fort Worth Court of Appeals answered these questions in In re Goodman, No. 02-26-00061-CV (Tex. App.—Fort Worth Feb. 26, 2026, orig. proceeding). The case shows how the mandatory filing rule in Texas Estates Code Section 355.064(a) reaches not just the specific theory the claimant presented to the estate, but every claim sharing the same factual foundation.
Facts & Procedural History
In 2022, a custom homebuilder, Chris Thomas Custom Homes, Inc. (“CTCH”), entered into a written contract with Lonnie Ledbetter to design and build a home in Granbury, Texas. CTCH performed the work, but by February 2025 the company had submitted a draw request and demand for payment that Lonnie did not pay. Lonnie died in April 2025, leaving the unpaid balance as a loose end for his estate.
After Lonnie’s death, a contested probate proceeding opened in the County Court of Hood County. In June 2025, the county court appointed Catherine Goodman as temporary dependent administrator of Lonnie’s estate. With a representative in place, the path was open for creditors to assert their claims.
On August 5, 2025, CTCH filed an authenticated matured secured claim in the probate case. The claim said CTCH was owed $101,083.75 for services and materials furnished under its contract with Lonnie, secured by a mechanic’s lien against the property.
Two days later, Goodman rejected the claim. Under Texas Estates Code Section 355.064(a), that rejection started a ninety-day clock. CTCH had until November 5, 2025, to file suit in the County Court of Hood County — the court of original probate jurisdiction where the estate was pending. That was the only court the statute authorized.
In September 2025, CTCH filed suit. But it did not file in the county court. It filed in the 355th District Court of Hood County. The petition expressly said Goodman’s rejection had “compelled” CTCH to seek relief. CTCH asserted breach of contract, quantum meruit, and violation of the Texas Prompt Payment Act, and it sought judicial foreclosure of its mechanic’s lien.
After the ninety-day deadline passed with no suit filed in the county court, Goodman moved to dismiss CTCH’s claims against the estate under Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 91a, arguing the claims were statutorily barred. The district court denied the motion. Goodman then sought mandamus relief from the Fort Worth Court of Appeals. So the central question for the court of appeals was straightforward: did Section 355.064(a) bar every cause of action CTCH had filed, or only the breach-of-contract theory matching the rejected probate claim?
How Section 355.064(a) Works — and Which Court “Original Probate Jurisdiction” Means
To understand why CTCH lost, you have to start with the statute. Texas Estates Code Section 355.064(a) governs what happens after a probate estate’s personal representative rejects a creditor’s claim. The statute reads, in relevant part, that a rejected claim “is barred unless not later than the 90th day after the date of rejection the claimant commences suit on the claim in the court of original probate jurisdiction in which the estate is pending.”
Two things stand out. First, the ninety-day deadline is a hard cutoff. There is no equitable tolling, no cure period, no extension for confusion. Second, the statute names the specific tribunal where the suit must be filed — the court of original probate jurisdiction where the estate is pending. That is the actual court supervising the estate, not just any court with subject-matter jurisdiction over the dispute. In Hood County, that court was the constitutional county court. It was the only court in which CTCH could commence a timely suit on its rejected claim.
The point gets sharper when you compare the current statute to its predecessor. Former Probate Code Section 313 allowed a suit on a rejected claim to be filed “in the court of original probate jurisdiction” or “in any other court of proper jurisdiction.” That second phrase gave creditors flexibility. Even so, at least one court of appeals affirmed dismissal of a suit on a rejected claim filed in district court instead of the county court at law where the estate was pending, holding the county court at law was “the only court with jurisdiction.” See Howe State Bank v. Crookham, 873 S.W.2d 745 (Tex. App.—Dallas 1994, no writ).
When the Legislature enacted the Texas Estates Code, it dropped the “any other court of proper jurisdiction” language. Words excluded from a statute are presumed to have been left out on purpose. The court in Goodman read that omission exactly that way: by stripping out the broader language, the Legislature made the court of original probate jurisdiction the exclusive forum for a suit on a rejected estate claim. That is why the dominant-jurisdiction doctrine — which assumes two courts have concurrent authority — never had a foothold in this case.
The Court’s Analysis: Substance Over Labels, and No Escape Through Dominant Jurisdiction
CTCH had two arguments for surviving the bar. The court rejected both.
CTCH’s first argument was that Section 355.064(a) only barred the theories actually presented to the estate. The probate claim asserted breach of contract and a secured mechanic’s lien for unpaid amounts. The district-court petition added quantum meruit, a Texas Prompt Payment Act claim, and a request for judicial foreclosure of the lien. CTCH said those additional theories were never part of the rejected claim and so could proceed in district court regardless of Section 355.064(a).
The court answered with a principle Texas law has applied for decades: courts look at the substance of a claim, not its label. As the Texas Supreme Court put it in Brumley v. McDuff, 616 S.W.3d 826, 833 (Tex. 2021), courts should acknowledge the substance of the relief sought regardless of how a party styles its pleading. Or, in the older formulation: “The true nature of a lawsuit depends on the facts alleged in the petition, the rights asserted and the relief sought, and not on the terms used to describe the cause of action.” Karagounis v. Bexar County Hospital District, 70 S.W.3d 145, 147 (Tex. App.—San Antonio 2001, pet. denied).
The court drew the same line that Texas courts draw in res judicata cases. A prior judgment bars not just claims actually litigated, but claims arising from the same subject matter that could have been brought before. See Barr v. Resolution Trust Corp., 837 S.W.2d 627, 630 (Tex. 1992); Getty Oil Co. v. Insurance Co. of North America, 845 S.W.2d 794, 798–99 (Tex. 1992). What controls is the factual predicate, not the legal theory the plaintiff picks. The Texas Supreme Court applied the same approach in Yamada v. Friend, 335 S.W.3d 192, 196–97 (Tex. 2010), where the plaintiffs’ failure to serve a timely expert report under the Medical Liability Act required dismissal of both their healthcare-liability claims and their ordinary negligence claim — because both rested on the same underlying facts.
Applied to Goodman, every cause of action in CTCH’s district-court petition — breach of contract, quantum meruit, Prompt Payment Act, lien foreclosure — arose from the same operative facts: the construction contract, the work performed, and the unpaid amounts. CTCH’s own petition acknowledged that the district-court lawsuit was filed in direct response to Goodman’s rejection. There were no independent facts supporting the additional theories. They all shared the same gravamen, so they were all part of the rejected estate claim and all barred by the same ninety-day failure.
The Estates Code’s own definition of “claims” reinforced the result. Section 22.005(1) defines claims to include “liabilities of a decedent that survive the decedent’s death . . . regardless of whether the liabilities arise in contract or tort or otherwise.” Whether the liability is contract, quasi-contract, or statutory, it counts as a claim against the estate. CTCH’s various theories were all claims, all arising from the same transaction, all subject to the same ninety-day rule.
The lien-foreclosure theory got the same treatment. A lien is not a free-standing claim that survives once the underlying debt is barred. As the court noted, citing Palmer v. Palmer, 831 S.W.2d 479, 482 (Tex. App.—Texarkana 1992, no writ), “A lien is an incident of, and is inseparable from, the debt.” When the debt is barred, the lien goes with it.
CTCH’s fallback argument was that even if Section 355.064(a) applied to everything, the proper remedy was abatement, not dismissal. CTCH leaned on In re Puig, 351 S.W.3d 301 (Tex. 2011), which holds that when two courts have concurrent jurisdiction over inherently intertwined issues, a dilatory plea in abatement is the right tool for resolving the conflict.
That argument failed on two grounds. First, Section 355.064(a) doesn’t create concurrent jurisdiction. It requires the suit to be filed in the court of original probate jurisdiction, and only that court. The county court had exclusive jurisdiction, not merely dominant jurisdiction. The district court had no authority to hear the suit on the rejected claim at all.
Second, the dominant-jurisdiction doctrine requires two pending lawsuits on the same subject matter. CTCH never filed in the county court. With no competing proceeding, the doctrine had nothing to manage. See Musquiz v. Marroquin, 124 S.W.3d 906, 911 (Tex. App.—Corpus Christi–Edinburg 2004, pet. denied) (doctrine does not apply absent a petition filed in the competing court raising the same issues).
The court also turned away CTCH’s equity argument that dismissal — rather than abatement — would encourage estate representatives to “lay behind the log” and wait out the ninety days before disclosing the jurisdictional defect. Section 355.064(a) puts the burden on the claimant to file in the right court within the deadline. An estate representative has no duty to fix the claimant’s procedural mistakes.
Because CTCH’s claims were barred on the face of its own pleadings — including the probate claim and rejection memo it attached as exhibits — the Rule 91a motion should have been granted. Rule 91a lets a trial court dismiss a case with “no basis in law or fact,” and it expressly allows the court to consider exhibits attached to the live pleading. The court conditionally granted mandamus and directed the trial court to grant Goodman’s motion to dismiss.
The Takeaway
Texas probate law gives creditors a clear path to contest a rejected estate claim, but the path has no forgiveness built into it. In re Goodman drives home two practical lessons. First, dressing up a rejected claim in new legal theories will not save it. If the additional causes of action arise from the same facts — breach of contract, quantum meruit, lien foreclosure, statutory payment claims, anything else — they get swept into the bar with everything else. Second, the dominant-jurisdiction doctrine is not a backup plan. Abatement requires two pending lawsuits, and a claimant who never filed in the right court has nothing to abate.
For creditors, the playbook is simple. When you get a rejection notice, calendar the ninety-day deadline that day. File the suit in the court of original probate jurisdiction — the same court where the estate is pending — not the district court, not a statutory county court at law unless that court is the one handling the probate. If you’re unsure which court that is, call a probate attorney before the deadline runs, not after. For estate representatives and administrators on the other side, Goodman confirms that Rule 91a, paired with mandamus if the trial court denies it, is an effective way to enforce the bar when a creditor sues in the wrong forum.
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