Imagine you are a commercial landlord in Harris County. Your tenant has an option to buy the property at the end of the lease, and the relationship has soured. You want the tenant out. A district court grants a temporary injunction that blocks you from pursuing eviction. You decide to wait it out, figuring trial is right around the corner. Weeks turn into months. The trial date keeps sliding. Eventually you ask the court to dissolve the injunction, pointing to the same hearing evidence you always thought was too thin to justify it.
That plan runs into a wall. The court will not let you use a motion to dissolve as a second bite at the apple. Once you let the deadline to appeal the original injunction pass, the ground shifts under you. This is a timing lesson every Texas litigant should learn, and it matters for any probate attorney who has dealt with a frozen estate asset or a blocked distribution.
The Texas First Court of Appeals worked through exactly this problem in Soon Hwa Lee and Alice Lee Chan, as Executrix of the Estate of An Sik Lee v. Sang Ku Park, No. 01-24-00627-CV (Tex. App.—Houston [1st Dist.] Mar. 10, 2026). The court had to decide whether landlords who missed the window to appeal a temporary injunction could still knock it out with a motion to dissolve. The answer shows just how demanding the “changed circumstances” standard really is.
Facts and Procedural History
The fight was over a piece of commercial property in Harris County and a landlord-tenant relationship that collapsed into litigation. The decedent, An Sik Lee, held an interest in the property. After his death, his estate came under the administration of the executrix, Alice Lee Chan, and Soon Hwa Lee stood alongside her as a landlord. Together the Lees were the landlords. Sang Ku Park was the tenant.
Park’s lease contained option-to-purchase language, giving him the right to buy the property at the end of the lease term. That option became the fault line for the whole dispute. When the relationship broke down, Park sued in the 125th District Court of Harris County to protect his rights under the lease.
In August 2023, the trial court signed a temporary injunction that blocked the landlords from taking any steps to evict Park. The order used standard language stating that the injunction would stay in place until trial. The court set the case for a two-week trial docket starting in November 2023. With trial that close, the landlords chose not to appeal the injunction right away.
That choice cost them. A party who wants to appeal a temporary injunction has to file within twenty days of the order. See Tex. R. App. P. 26.1(b), 28.1. The landlords let that window close. Then the November trial date moved. And moved again. The case never reached trial. About six months after the injunction issued, with the case still untried, the landlords filed a motion to dissolve. They argued that Park never proved irreparable harm and that a district court had no business blocking an eviction, since eviction suits belong to the justice courts. The trial court denied the motion, and the landlords appealed that denial under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code section 51.014(a)(4), which authorizes an immediate appeal from an order denying a motion to dissolve a temporary injunction.
The probate angle here is easy to miss but worth stating plainly. When an estate is the landlord, the executor is the one managing leases, options, and any effort to sell or recover the property. A temporary injunction against the estate can freeze that work for years. So the timing rules below apply directly to executors and administrators, not just to ordinary commercial landlords.
What a Temporary Injunction Does, and Why the Appeal Clock Matters
To understand why the landlords were stuck, start with what a temporary injunction is. It is an emergency order that holds the parties in place while a lawsuit works through the system. It is not a ruling on who ultimately wins. To get one, a party has to show a cause of action, a probable right to the relief sought, and a probable, imminent, and irreparable injury in the meantime. An injury is irreparable when money damages would not fix it, which comes up often in lease disputes where the property or the contract right is hard to price. The whole point is to stop one side from doing something that would gut the lawsuit before the facts get developed at trial.
Texas gives the enjoined party a fast way to challenge that order: an immediate interlocutory appeal under section 51.014(a)(4). The legislature built that pathway because a temporary injunction can do real damage while a case drags on. A landlord blocked from eviction, a business blocked from operating, an estate blocked from selling an asset, none of these are minor. An immediate appeal lets a wrongly enjoined party get relief without waiting years for a final judgment.
But that right comes with a hard deadline. A party has twenty days to file the notice of appeal. When that deadline passes without a filing, the chance to argue that the injunction was wrong, that the evidence was thin or the court applied the wrong standard, is gone. Texas appellate courts have no jurisdiction to revisit whether the injunction was properly granted once the time to appeal it runs out. From that point on, the law treats the injunction as if it were correctly issued.
A Motion to Dissolve Is Not a Do-Over
So if the appeal window has closed, what is left? Texas law gives a separate tool: the motion to dissolve. A party can ask the trial court to lift the injunction, and if the court refuses, that denial can be appealed too. On paper this looks like a backdoor to relitigating the original order. It is not.
The Austin Court of Appeals stated the rule plainly back in 1984 in Tober v. Turner of Texas, Inc., 668 S.W.2d 831, 836 (Tex. App.—Austin 1984, no writ): “The purpose of the motion to dissolve is to provide a means to show that changed circumstances or changes in the law require the modification or dissolution of the injunction; the purpose is not to give an unsuccessful party an opportunity to relitigate the propriety of the original grant.” The Houston Fourteenth Court of Appeals said the same thing just months before Lee, in Yuwei Enterprise, Inc. v. Bayou Social Club, LLC, No. 14-24-00109-CV, 2025 WL 411683 (Tex. App.—Houston [14th Dist.] Feb. 6, 2025, no pet.). When the original injunction is not appealed, the court presumes it was not improvidently granted and will not consider whether it was right on appeal from the denial of a motion to dissolve.
That leaves the “changed circumstances” standard, drawn from the Texas Supreme Court’s decision in Smith v. O’Neill, 813 S.W.2d 501, 502 (Tex. 1991). To win a motion to dissolve, the moving party has to show that something changed since the injunction issued, something that makes it unwarranted now for a reason that did not exist before. Courts have counted things like a change in the underlying facts, a change in the law, a shift in the parties’ positions, or new evidence that was not available at the original hearing. What does not count is a better argument about the original hearing, no matter how persuasive.
How the Court Ruled
This is exactly where the landlords fell short. Their motion pointed back to the evidence from the injunction hearing and argued it never established irreparable harm. The court was not moved. It acknowledged the landlords “might or might not be right” about that evidence, but said it did not matter. The changed-circumstances test does not ask whether the injunction should have been granted in the first place; it asks only whether something new has come up since. The record showed nothing new, so the trial court acted within its discretion when it denied the motion.
The court spelled out why the rule works this way. If a party could file a motion to dissolve at any time and use it to reopen review of the original order, the twenty-day deadline would mean nothing. A litigant could just wait, file the motion whenever convenient, and appeal the denial, turning a narrow, fast interlocutory review into an open-ended do-over. Texas courts have refused to let that happen.
The landlords also raised a stronger-sounding argument: that the district court lacked subject-matter jurisdiction to block them from pursuing an eviction in justice court. Under Texas Property Code section 24.004(a), eviction suits, including forcible entry and detainer actions, belong to the justice court where the property sits. Because jurisdiction can be raised at any time, the landlords said this issue survived even though they never raised it in the motion to dissolve. They leaned on Jelinis, LLC v. Hiran, 557 S.W.3d 159, 166 (Tex. App.—Houston [14th Dist.] 2018, pet. denied), and McGlothlin v. Kliebert, 672 S.W.2d 231, 232 (Tex. 1984), for the point that eviction belongs in justice court.
Park had an answer. Where the right to immediate possession turns on a title dispute, the justice court loses jurisdiction and the district court can step in and enjoin. He cited Midway CC Venture I, LP v. O&V Venture, LLC, 527 S.W.3d 531, 535 (Tex. App.—Houston [1st Dist.] 2017, no pet.): if resolving a title dispute is necessary to decide possession, the justice court has no jurisdiction and can be enjoined.
The court rejected the landlords’ jurisdictional theory. The injunction order did not purport to decide any eviction question. Blocking the landlords from evicting is not the same as pulling eviction into the district court to be litigated there. The court pointed to McDowell v. Hightower, 111 Tex. 585, 242 S.W. 753, 754 (1922), for the principle that an order is not void just because a court may have read the statutes wrong. Even if the eviction prohibition was imprecise, it did not cross into jurisdictional nullity. And because the appeal came from the denial of a motion to dissolve, with no changed circumstances, the court did not need to decide the title-versus-eviction question at all. It affirmed.
The Takeaway
Lee does not announce a new rule. It reaffirms settled ones, and it shows how the order of your procedural moves decides what relief is still on the table. The landlords made a reasonable-sounding bet: trial looked close, the injunction would die on its own when the case was tried, so why spend the money on an interlocutory appeal? That bet cost them the ability to challenge the injunction on the merits. Once the twenty-day window closed, the changed-circumstances standard was all they had, and that standard is built for events that happen after the injunction, not for a replay of the original hearing.
The court’s closing line is the practical point: “The cure is not to perpetuate the skirmishing about the injunction. The cure is to try the case.” For estates holding commercial real property, for executors managing leases and purchase options, and for anyone on either side of a temporary injunction in Texas, the lesson is the same. Evaluate the appeal window the moment the order issues. If you think the injunction is wrong, appeal it within twenty days. Wait too long and a motion to dissolve will not save you, because the court will treat the injunction as valid and ask only what has changed since.
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The content of this website is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice. The information presented may not apply to your situation and should not be acted upon without consulting a qualified probate attorney. We encourage you to seek the advice of a competent attorney with any legal questions you may have.
