Waco Cases in New Patent Campaigns Are Now More Evenly Distributed Among Judges

RPX’s fourth-quarter report takes a deep dive into the impact of a July 25, 2022 order in West Texas that was designed to reduce the concentration of patent cases before District Judge Alan D. Albright. While prior rules allowed plaintiffs to pick Judge Albright by filing their patent cases directly in Waco, where he is the only district judge, this order required that Waco’s patent cases be randomly assigned among a larger pool of 12 judges, including Judge Albright (since reduced to 11). Yet the results were far more lopsided than some had anticipated. Due to the district’s practice of assigning new cases in existing campaigns to the same judge based on overlapping parties and patents, most of those “legacy” filings ended up before Judge Albright.

However, cases that fall into new campaigns have been far more evenly distributed, as shown below. Note that Judges Orlando L. Garcia and Xavier Rodriguez received more cases than the rest only because each was assigned a separate group of related cases. The corresponding number of campaigns within which those cases fall (shown as purple dots below) is much more even among the judges in the pool, further confirming that the assignments are indeed random when there are no related cases open in the district.

At some point, the number of defendants available to be added to “legacy” litigation campaigns is likely to decline, thereby impacting the popularity of the Western District—a shift that may already be occurring, as will be detailed in an upcoming analysis.

For more on West Texas, venue, and other key patent litigation trends last year, see RPX’s report on the fourth quarter and 2022.