Judge Albright, Again the Nation’s Top Patent Judge in Q2, Gets Further Pushback from Federal Circuit

The top judge in Q2 2022 was Western District of Texas Judge Alan D. Albright, with 25% of new litigation filed in his courtroom. Judge Albright—who has gone to great lengths to attract patent litigation, drawing the ire of Congress in the process—has shown a restrictive approach to various defensive motions. Among other such tendencies, Judge Albright has expressed an aversion to granting motions to stay pending the outcome of PTAB trials and an inclination against granting patent eligibility challenges early in the course of litigation.

Perhaps the most ink, however, has been spilled over his handling of requests to transfer litigation to other districts—especially on convenience grounds, under 28 USC Section 1404. Judge Albright has largely tended to deny convenience transfer motions, applying the substantive factors underpinning the required analysis in a manner that has frequently led to objections from the Federal Circuit. As detailed in RPX’s first-quarter report, the appellate court has repeatedly reversed Judge Albright’s transfer decisions on mandamus, doing so 18 times last year—often flagging a series of repeated legal errors that he has made despite the court’s ongoing criticism.

While that wave has slowed to a steady trickle, one recent opinion—the second such reversal by the Federal Circuit this year—suggests that Judge Albright’s approach is still not to the court’s liking. On May 26, the Federal Circuit held that Judge Albright erred by denying Apple’s motion to transfer a case filed against it by BillJCo LLC, despite his use of revised arguments that cited the appellate court’s prior mandamus rulings against him, concluding that he had made a similar set of legal errors in his application of the relevant factors. Among those repeated errors were his characteristic emphasis on his district’s quick time to trial for the “court congestion” factor, notwithstanding his newfound reliance on actual trial timing statistics versus speculative, scheduled dates; and his overemphasis on a defendant’s general presence in a district for the “local interest” factor, rather than focusing on acts related to the “events that gave rise to a suit”. More details can be found on RPX Insight.

See RPX’s second-quarter review for more on recent trends impacting patent litigation and the patent marketplace.