About this site

Who wrote it

A small landlord in Central Texas who took one residential nonpayment eviction through a Williamson County justice court without an attorney, and wrote down each step while it was still fresh. Not a lawyer, not a paralegal, and not connected to any court, agency or legal service.

The case was uncontested: the tenant never filed an answer, never appeared, and never appealed. That is the easiest version of this process, and the site says so wherever it matters.

Why there are no names, addresses or dollar figures

The site was written from a complete case file — pleadings, exhibits, service photographs, the signed judgment, post-judgment filings. None of that is published, and none of it is in the public repository.

Deliberately absent: party names, the property address, the cause number, the landlord entity, every dollar figure from the case, e-filing envelope and transaction identifiers, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, employer, government identifiers, and the names of the specific judge, clerk and deputy involved.

The real timeline is published as relative day offsets — Day 0, Day 4, Day 24 — rather than calendar dates. Day offsets teach the intervals, which is the genuinely useful part, and cannot be used to look the case up on a public docket.

How the law here was verified

Every statutory citation on this site was checked against primary sources on 29 August 2026, principally the enrolled text of S.B. 38 (89th Legislature, 2025) and the official Texas Statutes.

That check changed the site materially. My own working notes — written during the case — contained several errors that survived right up until verification:

• I had the minimum gap between service and trial as six days. S.B. 38 reduced it to four.
• I expected to request an alias citation after eight days. That procedure was replaced by a five-business-day service effort rule with alternative-officer service.
• I had conflated the lockout and utility-interruption penalty statutes. They are separate sections with separate triggers.
• I had two abstract-of-judgment provisions transposed.
• I believed writs expired on fixed 60-day and 90-day clocks. That could not be confirmed from any primary source, so it has been removed rather than published.

Those corrections are the reason this page exists. If someone who ran a case to completion still had five errors in his notes, a page written from memory alone is not safe to rely on.

What is still unverified

Stated plainly, because pretending otherwise is how guides become dangerous:

• Williamson County specifics — precinct boundaries, court addresses, filing fees and constable fee schedules. I could not retrieve current details from an official county source, so none are published. What to ask instead.
• Cost figures on the costs page are illustrative ranges, not quotes from any current fee schedule.
• Some Rule 510 subsections. S.B. 38 moved much of the substance into Property Code chapter 24, and parts of the rule series were restructured. Where a provision now lives in the statute, the statute is cited.

Why it never says "you should"

Two reasons. Texas has real rules about the unauthorized practice of law, and this site is written by someone with no licence to give advice. But also, it is simply more honest: one uncontested case is not a pattern, and what worked once in one precinct is not a recommendation for your situation.

So the site describes the public procedure, and what one person actually did. The difference matters.

How it is built

Plain static HTML and CSS. No framework, no build step, no tracking, no analytics, no cookies, no fonts or scripts loaded from anywhere else. The pages work with JavaScript disabled — the only script is the deadline calculator and a menu toggle, and both run entirely in your browser. Nothing you type into the calculator leaves your device.

That is deliberate. This content should still open and still be readable in ten years, on anything, by anyone who wants to fork it.

Reuse

The written content is available under CC BY 4.0 — adapt it, translate it, use it for another county or another state, with attribution. The site code is MIT licensed.

If you adapt it for a different jurisdiction, please re-verify every citation. Most of what is here is Texas-specific and several provisions are less than a year old.

Corrections

The most valuable contribution to a site like this is a correction with a primary source attached. Fees change, precincts move, rules get amended, and a guide that is quietly out of date does real harm to someone relying on it at the worst moment of their year.

Open an issue or send a pull request.