Judge Albright, Still in Second Place for 2023, Faces Further Appellate Scrutiny

Eastern District of Texas Chief Judge Rodney Gilstrap was the nation’s top district judge in 2023, with 12% of all new patent litigation falling in his courtroom. Western District of Texas Judge Alan D. Albright followed in a distant second place at 5%, his patent docket scaled back due to case assignment reforms implemented in July 2022 that targeted the concentration of patent litigation in his Waco courtroom.

Judge Albright ranked even lower in the fourth quarter, falling out of the top five for the first time since his earliest few months on the bench (overseeing just 2% of the country’s overall patent litigation in Q4 2023). Judge Gilstrap stayed in a comfortable fourth-quarter lead at 14%; in second place was District Judge Amos L. Mazzant III, also of the Eastern District, at 3%.

Though Judge Albright’s overall share of patent filings has dipped, he has continued to attract the scrutiny of the Federal Circuit over his handling of convenience transfer motions, which he has tended not to grant since taking the bench in 2018. Starting in 2020, the Federal Circuit began to repeatedly reverse him on that issue in response to mandamus petitions from defendants with transfer motions he had either denied or ignored—identifying various legal errors and faulting him for repeatedly delaying transfer rulings. That early wave of reversals slowed significantly by 2023, as Judge Albright adjusted his approach in response to those rulings. While a late-2022 venue decision by the governing regional circuit, the Fifth Circuit, appeared to some as requiring a more deferential posture, the Federal Circuit concluded otherwise in February 2023—ruling in In re: Google that not only did it owe relatively minimal deference to a district judge’s weighing of certain factors like relative time to trial, but that NPEs lacked an interest in quick trials altogether.

Judge Albright has since applied that ruling as required, though not without offering criticisms—also filling the gaps with his own attempts to reconcile Fifth and Federal Circuit law. In November, though, the Fifth Circuit issued a decision that appears to firmly support the Federal Circuit’s approach, reversing Judge Albright in a copyright case (in In re: TikTok) based on many of the same reasons previously relied upon by the Federal Circuit in patent matters. As 2023 drew to a close, the Federal Circuit issued a pair of mandamus rulings applying that latest precedent—one granting Samsung’s request for a writ ordering transfer by Judge Albright to the Northern District of California, and the other denying plaintiff DoDots Licensing Solutions LLC’s request to undo his transfer of a parallel case against Apple to the same venue—confirming that the appeals court is still watching him closely.

See RPX’s fourth-quarter review for more on patent litigation trends in Q4 and 2023 overall.