Study: patent suit filings in East Texas dropped 60%+ in 90 days after SCOTUS limited “venue shopping” by patent trolls, compared to 90 days before the ruling
Can Delaware handle the incoming caseload? — New lawsuits are down—way down—in the mostly rural district …
Context & Ripple Effects
This ruling is the payoff to a storyline the coverage has tracked for years: studies found 90% of tech patent lawsuits in early 2015 were filed by trolls, and East Texas was their preferred forum until a local judge dismissed 168 cases from prolific filer eDekka and quarterly filings fell 33%. When SCOTUS agreed in late 2016 to hear the venue-shopping case, the question was whether a procedural fix could do what case-by-case dismissals could not.
The answer, per this study, is yes — at least locally: East Texas filings collapsed more than 60% within 90 days of the decision. But the same coverage shows displacement, not disappearance: by 2020, West Texas had become the new hotbed under a judge with a patent-litigation background.
First-order effects
- Plaintiffs who would have filed in East Texas must now sue where defendants have an established place of business — putting Delaware, named in the article's own framing, on deck to absorb the redirected caseload.
- East Texas loses the volume that made it the default forum for tech patent assertions, immediately shrinking the docket its judges and local legal ecosystem were built around.
Second-order effects
- Delaware faces a surge in patent dockets it did not choose, testing whether its courts become the next de facto national forum for infringement suits.
- Assertion businesses re-optimize around the new rule, scouting districts whose judges and juries remain favorable — the pattern West Texas exemplifies once a sympathetic judge took office there.
Third-order effects
- If every venue fix just relocates filings, the durable lever is not geography but the economics of assertion itself — fee-shifting, damages reform, or IPR-style review — since procedural rules have now twice proven movable.
- Forum competition becomes a standing feature of US patent litigation: districts gain and lose caseload based on judicial composition, giving individual judges outsized influence over where multi-billion-dollar disputes land.
The trend: Patent litigation behaves like water finding the lowest ground: each procedural barrier to one friendly venue redirects troll filings to the next, making forum migration — not elimination — the recurring pattern.