In Webb Consolidated Independent School District v. Marshall, the Texas Supreme Court addressed a recurring question in litigation involving a potential fee award: when has a party prevailed? The answer is usually straightforward. A party does not prevail merely by winning temporary relief, obtaining favorable findings, or surviving long enough to proclaim a procedural impasse. For example, a temporary injunction, by design, ordinarily does nothing more than preserve the status quo, and it does not typically adjudicate the parties’ final rights.
But Webb presents an unusual case where the label ‘temporary injunction’ did not match the substance of the actual relief granted. The temporary injunction at issue did not ‘preserve’ anything. Instead, it compelled the production of information requested by the plaintiffs. And once that information was disclosed, the case was ‘over’ in the practical sense as to those documents. The Texas Supreme Court therefore held that the plaintiffs had prevailed for purposes of recovering attorney’s fees under Texas Education Code § 11.1512(c-2).[1]
The case arose from a dispute between Webb CISD and two school board members, Robert and Amy Marshall. Section 11.1512 gives school board members who act in an official capacity an “inherent right of access” to “information, documents, and records maintained by the [school] district.”[2] Within these categories, the school board members requested information concerning agenda items for an upcoming board meeting. When the District allegedly failed to provide the information, they sued for injunctive relief and attorney’s fees under § 11.1512(c-2).[3]
The trial court entered a “Temporary Injunction Order” requiring the District to produce documents and information responsive to the plaintiffs’ specifically requested categories within twenty days. The District complied and declined to appeal. Subsequently, both the School board members’ terms as school board members expired. Because they were no longer school board members, they no longer had any continuing statutory right to the requested information, rendering their remaining substantive claims moot. The District later argued that the School board members could not recover fees because they had obtained only a temporary injunction.[4]
That argument ultimately failed to persuade the Supreme Court because it treated the order’s mere title as dispositive on the issue. The Supreme Court began with reciting the general rule that temporary injunctions usually do not typically confer prevailing party status because they are provisional remedies based on a probable right to relief, not a final determination of the merits of the case.[5] The Court also referred to the United States Supreme Court’s recent decision in Lackey v. Stinnie, which held that a party prevails only when a court grants “enduring relief on the merits that alters the legal relationship between the parties.”[6]
Here, the District failed to address the decisive distinction concerning this “Temporary Injunction Order”; namely, that the injunction here did exactly that. Section 11.1512 authorized one meaningful remedy—an injunction requiring the District to produce the requested information. The case history reflects the final award of that remedy: the trial court ordered production, and the District produced the information. At that point, there was no further practical relief for the school board members to obtain as to those documents. As the Court explained, once the information had been disclosed, “there [was] no putting the genie back in the bottle.”[7] In other words, after the District produced the documents, the school board members received the statutory relief they sued to obtain.
Justice Hawkins’s concurrence clarified that Webb should not be misread as a broad rule that temporary injunction victories support attorney’s fees. They typically do not. The particular result reached in the case turned on both the “unusual statutory scheme” and the unusual effect of the order at issue. Rather than maintaining the status quo, the “Temporary Injunction Order” permanently altered it.[8] Practitioners should also note that the Court appropriately limited the fee award. The Court observed that the school board members had ‘prevailed’ only as to the documents covered by the temporary injunction, and any recoverable fees had to be limited and segregated accordingly.[9]
Though Webb was determined narrowly, it represents an important decision. The central message of the Court’s holding is that prevailing party status ultimately turns on the substance of the relief granted rather than mere nomenclature. When a court grants nominally interim relief that does not merely maintain the status quo and cannot be undone, Texas law will not pretend one party did not prevail merely because the order was titled ‘Temporary.’
Citations:
[1] Webb Consol. Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Marshall, — S.W.3d —-, 2026 WL 1108676, at 1, 5–6 (Tex. Apr. 24, 2026).
[2] Tex. Educ. Code § 11.1512(c).
[3] Webb, 2026 WL 1108676, at *1–2; Tex. Educ. Code § 11.1512(c-2).
[4] Webb, 2026 WL 1108676, at *2–4.
[5] Id. at *5; Harley Channelview Props., LLC v. Harley Marine Gulf, LLC, 690 S.W.3d 32, 37 (Tex. 2024).
[6] Lackey v. Stinnie, 604 U.S. 192, 207, 145 S. Ct. 659 (2025).
[7] Webb, 2026 WL 1108676, at *5.
[8] Id. at *8 (Hawkins, J., concurring).
[9] Id. at *6; Tony Gullo Motors I, L.P. v. Chapa, 212 S.W.3d 299, 313 (Tex. 2006).