§ 42.005.Supreme Court to Make Rules

A rulemaking delegation, and the chapter does not work without the rules it calls for.

The supreme court shall promulgate rules implementing this chapter, limited to settlement offers made under it, in effect on January 1, 2004.

The delegation is unusually specific about content. The rules must provide four things, and the statute sets them out.

The date by which a defendant must file the declaration that makes the procedure available.

The date before which a party may not make a settlement offer, and the date after which a party may not.

Those two windows are essential to the scheme. An offer made too early comes before either side knows the case; one made on the eve of trial gives no real opportunity to evaluate it, and would be a trap rather than an offer.

Procedures for making an initial offer, making successive offers, withdrawing, accepting, rejecting, and modifying the deadline for any of those.

The statute supplies none of that, which is why the chapter operates through the rules rather than on its own terms.

Subsection (c) requires the rules to address multiple parties, and specifies one outcome: where the offering party joins another party or designates a responsible third party after making the offer, the recipient may declare the offer void.

That protection is well judged. An offer is evaluated against the case as it stands, and adding a party changes the case — so an offeree should not be held to a comparison made against a different lawsuit.

Subsection (d) lets the rules designate further excluded actions and address other implementation matters, which leaves the court room to withdraw the procedure from case types that prove unsuitable.