Judge Albright Still Gets Most West Texas Patent Cases After Judge Reassignment Order

Last year, the former Chief Judge of the Western District of Texas, Orlando L. Garcia, sought to address criticisms surrounding the concentration of patent cases before Waco District Judge Alan D. Albright with an order designed to redistribute Waco’s patent cases. Filing rules previously let plaintiffs pick their division, thus guaranteeing they could select Judge Albright, where he is Waco’s only district judge. But the July order established that Waco’s patent cases would instead be randomly distributed among a group of 12 judges from across the entire district, including Judge Albright (with one judge having since been withdrawn from the group, now totaling 11).

While many expected filings in the Western District to dip dramatically as a result, the actual result was more muted. Filings rebounded after an initial drop—and by the end of the year, the decline was less dramatic than some had anticipated.

One of the main reasons that West Texas filings appear to have maintained a relatively steady pace is that Judge Albright is now getting assigned a disproportionate number of cases compared to the others in the Waco judge pool—over five times higher than the next highest judge and approximately half of all cases filed in Waco, as shown below.

Since the July 25 order, the Western District has apparently adopted a practice of assigning cases to Judge Albright when they relate to litigation already before him—in particular, when they share the same patents and parties (and thus fall within an existing litigation campaign), as reported by IAM. This so-called “grandfathering” practice has since been made explicit in docket entries marking case assignments to Judge Albright—e.g., “[c]ase assigned to Judge Alan D[.] Albright due to related case” or “. . . due to previously filed case(s) as having same Plaintiff and patent case numbers”. Before this practice became automatic, the data indicate that those related cases were sometimes assigned to other judges but then reassigned to Judge Albright.

However, as shown in RPX’s review of the fourth quarter and 2022, the results are much different for cases that fall into new campaigns, with those filings much more evenly distributed across the judge pool.

See the full report for the rest of that analysis, and for more on other key patent litigation trends from last year.