Judge Albright’s Caseload Remained Slim in Q3 Due to Waco Assignment Order

The nation’s top district judge in Q3 2024 was Eastern District of Texas Chief Judge Rodney Gilstrap, with 22% of all new litigation falling in his court. Western District of Texas Judge Alan D. Albright, who once held first place by a wide margin, now remains well below the top five, overseeing just 1% of the country’s caseload.

Since taking the bench in 2018, Judge Albright—a former patent litigator—openly sought to attract patent cases to his court. By all accounts he succeeded, resulting in a concentration of cases targeting his courtroom directly. This was possible because filing rules let plaintiffs target a specific division, thereby guaranteeing they would get Judge Albright by filing in Waco, where he is the only district judge. However, a July 2022 case assignment order issued by former Chief Judge Orlando L. Garcia was designed to reduce this concentration, requiring that Waco’s patent cases be randomly assigned among a larger pool of judges, including Judge Albright. By deterring NPE filings in Waco, this in turn has contributed to an overall slide in the venue rankings for the Western District.

In the wake of this order, Judge Albright still saw a disproportionate share of new filings, due to the district’s subsequently developed practice of assigning new cases to the same judge that has overseen litigation involving the same parties and patents. Given the extent of Judge Albright’s prior caseload, many new cases related to those “legacy” lawsuits have ended up before him.

Then came a revised case assignment order issued by current Chief Judge Alia Moses on May 30, 2024. The order maintains the random case assignment policy but now requires parties to “file a motion with sufficient legal and factual justification” if they want to consolidate patent cases and get the presiding judge removed.

That requirement has led to a dispute in at least one campaign. In June, inventor Ferid Allani sued Alphabet (Google) and Apple in Waco, the Apple suit getting randomly assigned to Judge Albright and the Google suit to District Judge Leon Schydlower. Allani then filed a motion seeking to reassign the Google suit to Judge Albright and relate it to the Apple case, based in part on the fact that the lawsuits involve the same patents and would allegedly share “issues of claim construction, validity, and/or infringement”—an argument that Google contested, pointing out the lack of overlap in accused products and witnesses. Judge Schydlower denied that motion on August 30, noting that while Allani had styled his motion as invoking the May 30 case assignment order, it did not actually seek “consolidation” as covered by that order. Rather, Judge Schydlower instead rejected Allani’s attempt to merely relate the two cases as based on two orders that do not apply in Waco, one applying to the El Paso Division and the other a case management standing order that only applies for cases already in Judge Albright’s court.

Meanwhile, three other patent cases filed in Waco since the May 30 order were initially assigned to other judges but then reassigned to Judge Albright: Two were reassigned on the judges’ own initiative, merely citing their mutual “consent” to the transfers; and the third was explicitly reassigned because it had the same plaintiff and patent as another case before Judge Albright. Otherwise, lawsuits filed in the wake of the May 30 order and through Q3 do appear to have been assigned randomly, including filings in campaigns with litigation already before Judge Albright—though given that many of those cases were dismissed or settled before much substantive litigation, it is unclear whether similar disputes over case reassignments might have arisen had they continued.

See RPX’s third-quarter review for more on other key trends impacting patent litigation in Q3 2024.