Too Late For a Business Record

In Badiee v. Mahboubi, the Fifth Court affirmed a take-nothing judgment for the defendants in a suit for unpaid accounting fees, holding that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in excluding “updated invoices” the plaintiff offered under the business-records exception of Texas Rule of Evidence 803(6).

All the invoices were dated December 31, 2022 — after the parties’ fee dispute had arisen — and many described work performed in earlier years, some more than a decade before trial. The plaintiff testified that the invoices were created in QuickBooks as a regular practice when partial payment was received and that the underlying invoices were still available. On that record, the Court concluded that the records “were not made at or near the time of a regularly conducted business activity” within Rule 803(6)’s requirement. (The Court also found no harm, because the jury had already found a flat-fee agreement covering all of the plaintiff’s services, so any hourly-billing detail in the excluded invoices would have been cumulative on the central liability question.) No. 05-25-00334-CV (May 13, 2026)