NPE Filings in Waco Swing Downward Due to West Texas Judge Assignment Order

On July 25, 2022, the now-former chief judge of the Western District of Texas, Orlando L. Garcia, issued a standing order that was designed to reduce the concentration of patent litigation before District Judge Alan D. Albright. Rules previously allowed plaintiffs to file in their preferred division, thus allowing them to pick Judge Albright, Waco’s only district judge. The standing order reduced that temptation, establishing that all patent cases filed in Waco would be randomly assigned to a group of 12 (now 11) judges in the district, including Judge Albright.

Waco saw a noticeable slowdown in NPE litigation in the immediate aftermath of the July order, but complaints rebounded in late fall. However, as shown in RPX’s report on the first quarter, NPE activity in Waco began to decline again in mid-December, around the time the district’s new chief judge, Alia Moses, confirmed that the judge assignment order would remain in place. As shown below, NPE filings in Waco continued to slow into the new year and through the first quarter. At quarter’s end, cumulative NPE complaints in Waco since the original case assignment order were 34% lower than they were for the comparable prior-year period.

(Note that since the West Texas judge assignment order impacts case assignments, the following graph measures Waco activity using case counts. The other graphs in the Q1 report follow RPX’s usual practice of counting litigation by defendants added to campaigns.)

The size of this drop was one of the primary reasons that NPE litigation was down by 190 defendants in Q1 2023 (a 36% decline), along with a notable pause in litigation by a once-prolific litigant, patent monetization firm IP Edge LLC. Taken together, the reductions from IP Edge and in Waco (231 defendants in total, adjusting for the overlap in IP Edge and Waco cases) accounted for 100% of the decline in NPE activity in Q1 and then some.

For more on the Western District of Texas, venue, and other trends impacting patent litigation in Q1, see RPX’s first-quarter review.