In fiscal year 2024, judges of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas sentenced 1,221 people — a criminal docket that runs from methamphetamine conspiracies tried in Lubbock and Amarillo to investor-fraud trials a few blocks from the Dallas financial core. Federal court is a different arena from the Texas state courts: different prosecutors, different procedural rules, and exposure measured under the federal Sentencing Guidelines. Anyone under federal investigation or indictment in North Texas needs counsel who already works in that arena.
This guide maps the district for anyone facing charges here: the seven divisions and the judges who sit in them, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and what it actually prosecutes, the local criminal rules that shape daily practice, and the appellate and post-conviction paths that follow a conviction. Our firm, Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C., defends federal criminal cases, appeals, and post-conviction matters nationwide, including in the Northern District of Texas. Elizabeth Franklin-Best is recognized in Best Lawyers in America 2026 as a “Best Lawyer” in Appellate Practice and holds a Chambers USA 2026 ranking for Litigation: White-Collar Crime & Government Investigations — credentials matched to a district whose docket is salted with high-dollar corporate and investor-fraud prosecutions. This page is part of our federal courts directory.
If agents have made contact, a grand jury subpoena has arrived, or an indictment is already on file in any division from Dallas to Lubbock, we offer a paid, one-hour initial consultation to evaluate where the case stands and what should happen next.
Table of Contents
Quick Answer: Northern District of Texas
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What does the Northern District of Texas cover? | One hundred Texas counties — roughly 96,000 square miles and eight million people — organized into seven divisions: Dallas, Fort Worth, Abilene, Amarillo, Lubbock, San Angelo, and Wichita Falls. |
| Who leads the court? | Chief Judge Reed O’Connor, who sits in Fort Worth, heads a bench of twelve authorized district judgeships as of mid-2026. |
| Who prosecutes federal cases there? | The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas — roughly 100 federal prosecutors led by U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould as of mid-2026. |
| What charges dominate the docket? | Drug trafficking led FY2024 sentencings at 46.3%, followed by firearms (17.2%), immigration (10.1%), and fraud (9.3%). |
| Which circuit hears appeals? | Convictions here are reviewed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the New Orleans-based court for Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. |
| Where are post-conviction motions filed? | A Section 2255 motion attacking a Northern District of Texas conviction returns to this district — the court of conviction keeps it. |
| Can a lawyer from outside Texas appear here? | Yes. Admission pro hac vice is granted case-by-case under Local Criminal Rule 57.9, and the court ordinarily expects designated local counsel under Rule 57.10. |
| How do we start on your case? | With a paid, one-hour initial consultation reviewing the charges, the division, the assigned judge, and the realistic options. |
Key Takeaways
- The Northern District of Texas spans 100 counties and seven divisions, anchored by the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex and stretching across the Panhandle and West Texas plains.
- Congress has authorized twelve district judgeships for the district under 28 U.S.C. § 133; Chief Judge Reed O’Connor presides from Fort Worth as of mid-2026.
- In several divisions a single resident district judge handles the docket, so the courthouse where a case lands largely determines the judge who will decide it.
- The U.S. Attorney’s Office fields roughly 100 prosecutors from staffed offices in Dallas, Fort Worth, Lubbock, Amarillo, and Abilene.
- Drug-trafficking cases made up 46.3 percent of the district’s FY2024 sentencings — far above the 29.5 percent national share — with firearms and fraud prosecutions close behind.
- Corporate and investor fraud is a district signature: the Slync founder’s $25 million fraud conviction and the alleged $220 million Agridime cattle-contract scheme were both charged here.
- Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(b) gives a convicted defendant only 14 days from entry of judgment to file the notice of appeal that opens Fifth Circuit review.
- Motions under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 and compassionate-release motions are litigated back in this district, the court of conviction.
- We appear in the Northern District of Texas pro hac vice and pair that trial-level work with our core appellate and post-conviction practice.
The Northern District of Texas at a Glance
Texas has four federal judicial districts, and the Northern District is its northwestern quadrant: 100 counties covering roughly 96,000 square miles and some eight million people. Under 28 U.S.C. § 124(a), the district is organized into seven divisions — Dallas, Fort Worth, Abilene, Amarillo, Lubbock, San Angelo, and Wichita Falls. The clerk’s office is headquartered in Dallas’s Earle Cabell Federal Building, with divisional offices across the district; per the court’s own directory, the Wichita Falls courthouse is occupied only while court is in session, so filings in Wichita Falls cases run through Fort Worth.
Every criminal prosecution in the district is brought by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas, and every appeal from a judgment here goes to the Fifth Circuit, whose jurisdiction takes in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The circuit’s presence is felt locally: Fifth Circuit Judge Catharina Haynes keeps chambers in the same Earle Cabell building in Dallas where much of the district’s criminal docket is tried.
The docket reflects the territory. Dallas–Fort Worth’s corporate base supplies a steady run of securities, investor-fraud, and health-care-fraud prosecutions, while the district’s FY2024 sentencing mix — nearly half drug-trafficking cases — shows the enforcement weight carried by its western divisions. Like all 94 districts, the court applies the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, but it layers on local criminal rules with real teeth, discussed below.
The Bench: Twelve Judgeships, Seven Courthouses
Congress has authorized twelve district judgeships for the Northern District of Texas under 28 U.S.C. § 133. As of mid-2026, the court’s own directory lists Chief Judge Reed O’Connor, who sits in Fort Worth, alongside active District Judges Sam A. Lindsay, Ed Kinkeade, Karen Gren Scholer, Brantley Starr, and Ada Brown in Dallas; Mark T. Pittman in Fort Worth; Matthew J. Kacsmaryk in Amarillo; and James Wesley Hendrix in Lubbock. Six senior district judges — among them former Chief Judge David C. Godbey — continue to carry substantial caseloads, and nine magistrate judges handle initial appearances, detention hearings, and pretrial referrals across the district.
Two structural features of this bench matter to defendants. First, the court assigns every judge a letter designation that is built into each case number, so the presiding judge is identifiable the moment a docket number issues. Second, several divisions function as single-judge courts — an Amarillo indictment goes to the division’s one resident active district judge, and Lubbock’s docket is shared between one active and one senior judge — which means the place of indictment frequently determines who will rule on every motion and impose any sentence.
For that reason, we study the assigned judge’s published opinions, sentencing patterns, and courtroom preferences at the outset of every Northern District of Texas engagement. That research shapes strategy — which motions to file, how to frame a variance request — though no honest lawyer predicts an outcome from a judge’s name, and we never do.
Federal Criminal Cases in the District
The district’s criminal docket covers every federal offense category, but its center of gravity is distinctive. Drug-trafficking cases accounted for 46.3 percent of FY2024 sentencings here against a 29.5 percent national share, with firearms prosecutions at 17.2 percent, immigration cases at 10.1 percent, and fraud at 9.3 percent — and layered over those volume categories sits the white-collar practice for which Dallas is known nationally.
However a case begins — a target letter, a grand jury subpoena, or agents at the door — the procedural spine is the same. An indictment triggers an initial appearance and arraignment, usually before a magistrate judge; pretrial motions and discovery proceed under the district’s conference-and-briefing rules; and the case ends in a negotiated plea agreement or a trial, with sentencing under the Guidelines framework to follow. Our federal criminal process hub explains each stage in depth.
In FY2024 the district resolved 98.4 percent of its sentenced cases by guilty plea and saw only 20 trial convictions — numbers that reward early, aggressive defense work. We build the record from the first proffer decision forward: litigating suppression and venue questions, testing the government’s loss figures and drug-quantity math, negotiating when resolution serves the client, and trying the case when it does not.
Applied Insight: In a district where several divisions have a single resident judge and more than 98 percent of sentenced cases end in a plea, leverage is built before charges are filed, not after. The investigation phase — when counsel can engage prosecutors, shape the evidentiary picture, and sometimes narrow or avert charges altogether — is where a North Texas federal case is most often won or contained.
What Federal Prosecutors Pursue in North Texas
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas, established in 1879, fields roughly 100 Assistant U.S. Attorneys from staffed offices in Dallas, Fort Worth, Lubbock, Amarillo, and Abilene, with unstaffed posts in Wichita Falls and San Angelo. U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould leads the office from Dallas as of mid-2026. The office also anchors a North Texas OCDETF Strike Force — the multi-agency task-force model that drives the district’s outsized drug-conspiracy docket.
On the white-collar side, the office’s recent record shows why Dallas–Fort Worth is treated as a corporate-fraud venue of national consequence. In January 2024, a Dallas jury convicted Slync founder Christopher Kirchner of wire fraud and money laundering for diverting at least $25 million in investor funds — a verdict returned after four days of trial. In early 2026, a Fort Worth grand jury indicted five executives and associates of Agridime LLC over an alleged $220 million scheme built on purported cattle-purchase contracts, with more than 2,200 victims nationwide; those charges are allegations, and every defendant is presumed innocent. The office has likewise announced its own criminal health-care-fraud charges alongside the Justice Department’s national takedowns, and it continues to work through the pipeline of COVID-relief and program-fraud cases.
Two practical lessons follow for anyone charged here. Fraud indictments in this district arrive with serious agency work behind them — the FBI’s Dallas field office built the Slync case, and its Fort Worth resident agency worked the Agridime investigation with USDA’s inspector general — so the defense must match that sophistication on loss calculation, intent, and tracing. And venue reaches far: both prosecutions involved victims spread across the country, charged in North Texas because the company or the wires ran through it.
Local Criminal Rules with Real Consequences
The district’s local criminal rules, most recently amended effective September 3, 2024, are unusually prescriptive, and its judges expect compliance. Local Criminal Rule 47.1 requires counsel to confer with the opposing side before filing most motions and to attach a certificate of conference — a discipline borrowed from civil practice that routinely surprises out-of-district lawyers. Opposed motions need a supporting brief capped at 25 pages, responses are due within 14 days, reply briefs require leave of court, and oral argument is not held unless the judge orders it.
Rule 47.2(e) adds a requirement still rare in federal courts: a brief prepared using generative artificial intelligence must disclose that fact on its first page. Rule 16.1 requires marked trial exhibits to be exchanged, and exhibit and witness lists filed, at least 14 days before trial. And Rule 32.1 bars the probation officer from disclosing any sentencing recommendation — a wrinkle that changes how presentence-report objections and sentencing memoranda must be framed, because the defense briefs against a recommendation it will never see.
Out-of-district counsel feel Rules 57.9 and 57.10 most directly. Appearing without membership in the court’s bar requires pro hac vice permission from the presiding judge in each individual case, and an attorney whose principal office sits outside the district must ordinarily designate local counsel — a bar member within 50 miles of the divisional courthouse — unless the judge grants leave to proceed without one. We plan for both at the moment of engagement, so admission mechanics never delay the substantive defense.
Appeals and Post-Conviction Matters
Sentencing is not the end of the road, but the clock after it is unforgiving: under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(b), the notice of appeal that opens Fifth Circuit review is generally due just 14 days after judgment is entered on the docket. Recent law gives North Texas defendants live issues worth preserving. In Hewitt v. United States, 606 U.S. 419 (2025), the Supreme Court — reviewing stacked § 924(c) sentences imposed in this district — held that the First Step Act’s more lenient penalties apply when a pre-Act § 924(c) sentence has been vacated and the defendant must be resentenced. And in United States v. Diaz, 116 F.4th 458 (5th Cir. 2024), the circuit upheld the felon-in-possession statute, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), against a post-Bruen Second Amendment challenge — a question on which the circuits remain divided and the law is moving quickly. That movement reached the Supreme Court in June 2026: in United States v. Hemani, No. 24-1234 (U.S. June 18, 2026), the Court unanimously affirmed the Fifth Circuit and held that prosecuting an unlawful drug user under a different subsection, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3), violated the Second Amendment as applied to him — a decision that leaves Diaz and the felon-in-possession ban intact but confirms that as-applied Second Amendment challenges remain live in this circuit.
After direct appeal, the fight returns home: post-conviction relief belongs to the court of conviction, so a motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 attacking a Northern District of Texas judgment is filed and litigated in this district. The same is true of compassionate release motions under § 3582(c)(1)(A) for clients in federal custody. Relief on those motions is never routine: the U.S. Sentencing Commission reported a national compassionate-release grant rate of 14.1 percent for fiscal year 2025 (394 of 2,795 motions decided on the merits), with Fifth Circuit courts among the more conservative in the country, so a North Texas motion must be built with care. This is the core of our practice, and it is genuinely portable — the governing law is federal, the filings are electronic, and we brief and argue these motions in districts across the country.
How the Firm Practices in This Court
Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C. appears in the Northern District of Texas the way most national federal practices do: by admission pro hac vice under Local Criminal Rule 57.9. The mechanics, taken from the court’s own published procedures, are a per-case application to the presiding judge, a certificate of good standing issued within the past 90 days, and the applicable fee — with ECF registration required within 14 days of appearing in the case.
Because this district ordinarily requires designated local counsel under Local Criminal Rule 57.10, we either associate a member of the court’s bar near the divisional courthouse or seek leave to proceed without one — whichever serves the client and the case. Either way, the strategy, the briefing, and the courtroom advocacy remain ours. Federal criminal law does not change at the district line; what changes is local procedure, and we treat mastering it as part of the engagement.
Elizabeth Franklin-Best is admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court and all twelve federal circuit courts of appeals — including the Fifth Circuit, which reviews every Northern District of Texas conviction — and is the author of Reversing Your Criminal Conviction. Across her career she has handled more than 330 federal proceedings, over 100 of them appeals, appearing in all twelve regional circuits and at the U.S. Supreme Court; that appellate and post-conviction depth is what she brings to a North Texas trial record and to the Fifth Circuit review that may follow it. Clients in this district most often engage us for trial-level defense in fraud and white-collar matters, Fifth Circuit appeals, and § 2255 and compassionate-release litigation, and for the same work in the neighboring Southern and Western Districts of Texas.
Frequently Asked Questions
What area does the Northern District of Texas cover?
The district covers 100 Texas counties — roughly 96,000 square miles and about eight million residents. It is organized into seven divisions with courthouses in Dallas, Fort Worth, Abilene, Amarillo, Lubbock, San Angelo, and Wichita Falls, and the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex generates the largest share of its caseload.
Who are the judges of the Northern District of Texas?
Congress has authorized twelve district judgeships for the district. As of mid-2026, Chief Judge Reed O’Connor sits in Fort Worth, joined by active district judges in Dallas, Fort Worth, Amarillo, and Lubbock, six senior district judges, and nine magistrate judges. Every judge has a letter designation built into each case number, so the assigned judge is identifiable as soon as a case is docketed.
Who prosecutes federal crimes in the Northern District of Texas?
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas, led as of mid-2026 by U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould, brings every federal prosecution in the district. The office fields roughly 100 assistant U.S. attorneys working from staffed offices in Dallas, Fort Worth, Lubbock, Amarillo, and Abilene.
What federal crimes are most common in the Northern District of Texas?
Drug-trafficking cases dominated fiscal year 2024, accounting for 46.3 percent of the 1,221 people sentenced — well above the national share. Firearms offenses came next at 17.2 percent, followed by immigration cases at 10.1 percent and fraud at 9.3 percent. A substantial white-collar docket centered on Dallas runs alongside those volume categories.
Which appeals court reviews Northern District of Texas convictions?
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, headquartered in New Orleans, hears every appeal from this district, as it does from all federal districts in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The notice of appeal in a criminal case is generally due within 14 days after entry of judgment, so the appellate clock starts almost immediately after sentencing.
How does a federal criminal case proceed in the Northern District of Texas?
Most cases move from investigation to grand jury indictment, then initial appearance and arraignment, pretrial motions, and resolution by plea or trial. Local rules shape that path: most motions require a conference with the prosecution and a certificate of conference, briefs are capped at 25 pages, and trial exhibits must be exchanged 14 days before trial. More than 98 percent of sentenced cases in fiscal year 2024 ended in guilty pleas, which makes the investigation and negotiation phases decisive.
Can an out-of-state lawyer represent me in the Northern District of Texas?
Yes. A lawyer who is not a member of the court’s bar may be admitted pro hac vice for a specific case with the presiding judge’s permission under Local Criminal Rule 57.9. The court ordinarily expects out-of-district counsel to designate local counsel officed within 50 miles of the divisional courthouse under Rule 57.10, though judges may grant leave to proceed without one.
What well-known federal cases came from the Northern District of Texas?
Several recent matters drew national attention. Hewitt v. United States, the 2025 Supreme Court decision on First Step Act resentencing for stacked firearm counts, arose from prosecutions in this district. A Dallas jury convicted the founder of the software startup Slync of defrauding investors of at least 25 million dollars in 2024, and in 2026 a Fort Worth grand jury returned the indictment in the alleged 220 million dollar Agridime cattle-contract fraud.
Does your firm handle federal cases in the Northern District of Texas?
Yes. We defend clients in this district at the trial level, on direct appeal to the Fifth Circuit, and in post-conviction litigation, appearing pro hac vice and associating local counsel where the rules require. The first step is a paid, one-hour initial consultation reviewing the charges, the division, the assigned judge, and the realistic paths forward.
Talk With a Federal Criminal Defense Lawyer
Whether your case sits in the Earle Cabell courthouse in Dallas, before a single-judge division in the Panhandle, or already on appeal from a North Texas judgment, the calendar is rarely your friend — and the options narrow as it runs. Book a paid, one-hour initial consultation and we will give you a candid, specific assessment of the case and the road ahead.