§ 140B.055.Petition for Order Modifying or Setting Aside Demand

The route for resisting a demand, and it opens and closes quickly.

A petition may be filed at any time before the return date, or not later than the 30th day after service, whichever period is shorter. In practice the return date usually governs.

Two people may bring it: the person served, and where a product of discovery is demanded, the person from whom that discovery was obtained — who may hold privilege or confidentiality interests the recipient has no reason to assert.

Venue is the petitioner’s choice between the district court of their residence or principal office or place of business and a district court of Travis County.

That choice does more work in this chapter. A demand may come from a prosecutor in a distant county, and the petitioner may still litigate at home or in the capital.

The petition must specify each ground relied on, and may rest on any failure of a demand to comply with this subchapter or on any constitutional or other legal right or privilege.

Subsection (c) is the difficulty. The court shall presume, absent evidence to the contrary, that the attorney general or local prosecutor issued the demand in good faith and within the scope of that office’s authority.

Extending the presumption to every local prosecutor is the substantive change here, and it means a challenge to an overbroad demand from any of those offices starts from the same disadvantage.

An objection built on the demand’s own defects is therefore the stronger one — a class of documents the demand does not "fairly identify", or an unreasonable return date — since it can be shown from the document rather than argued against the presumption.