Judge Albright, Again the Top Patent Judge, Gets Federal Circuit Pushback over Auto Venue Ruling

The top district judge in the first quarter of 2022 was Western District of Texas Judge Alan D. Albright, with 19% of new patent litigation filed in his courtroom. As noted in RPX’s review of the fourth quarter and 2021, Judge Albright has attracted so much litigation in part by actively seeking out patent cases, a practice that has led to Congressional scrutiny—and, in turn, a study by the federal judiciary’s Committee on Court Administration and Case Management.

Judge Albright has become well known for his restrictive posture toward various defensive motions commonly brought in patent suits. These include motions to stay pending the outcome of PTAB trials and patent eligibility motions under Alice, which he has previously stated he is inclined against granting early in the course of litigation. Judge Albright has also lamented the difficulty of applying Section 101 caselaw consistently, remarking in a February ruling that “[a]t this point, it is trite to comment on the confusing abyss of patent eligibility law”.

That said, Judge Albright’s best-known tendency has arguably become his idiosyncratic approach to motions to transfer for convenience. As also detailed in RPX’s fourth-quarter review, the Federal Circuit has frequently reversed his decisions on mandamus, taking issue with the way he has applied various substantive factors and flagging a variety of repeated legal errors. In 2021, the Federal Circuit issued 18 writs of mandamus against Judge Albright on that issue, including nine in the prior quarter alone.

While the appellate court did so just once in the first quarter of 2022, that ruling—in In re: Volkswagen—overturned a notable decision by Judge Albright that venue can be proper against an automaker based in the activity of in-district dealerships. In that September 2021 opinion, Judge Albright concluded that the dealerships’ relationships with automakers, governed mainly by franchise agreements, make those dealerships the agents of the respective automakers; that the automakers ratify the in-district dealerships as their own places of business; and that the dealerships are conducting the business of the automakers in West Texas.

However, the Federal Circuit cut through each of those determinations, ruling instead that plaintiff StratosAudio, Inc. “failed to carry its burden to show that the dealerships are agents of Volkswagen or Hyundai under a proper application of established agency law”. For that reason, the appellate court determined that the in-district dealerships “do not constitute regular and established places of business of Volkswagen and Hyundai under [Section] 1400(b)”, taking instruction from its February 2020 holding in In re: Google (2019-0126).

See here for more details on the Federal Circuit’s decision and its potential impact.

Finally, for more on this and other trends impacting patent litigation and the patent marketplace, see RPX’s first-quarter review.