Report details how West Texas has become a hotbed for patent and IP litigation, after a federal judge, who was formerly a patent litigator, took office in 2018
Mike Masnick / Techdirt :
Context & Ripple Effects
Patent litigation has always followed friendly courtrooms: East Texas built its reputation as the troll filing capital until SCOTUS curbed venue shopping, after which filings there collapsed by more than half within 90 days, extending a slide that had already shown up as a 33% year-over-year drop in Q3 2015 filings.
The report covered here shows where the demand went: West Texas, where a federal judge who spent his prior career as a patent litigator took office in 2018. That single-judge concentration later grew large enough that the US Judiciary Conference agreed to review the case-assignment rules tech companies had long criticized, per Bloomberg's follow-up coverage.
First-order effects
- Defendants — mostly tech companies facing troll-filed suits — now see a growing share of their patent cases assigned to one West Texas judge whose professional background aligns with the plaintiffs' bar, recreating the home-field advantage East Texas lost.
- Patent plaintiffs gain a replacement venue: the filing strategy that fled East Texas after the SCOTUS ruling has a new destination with a receptive docket.
Second-order effects
- Tech companies' complaints about quarter-of-all-cases-before-one-judge concentration force the issue onto the Judiciary Conference's agenda, putting the local rule that lets plaintiffs effectively pick their judge under formal review.
- Litigation vendors — local counsel, court reporters, hotels around the courthouse — see demand shift westward, repricing the East Texas ecosystem that once captured troll-filing traffic.
Third-order effects
- If case assignment keeps letting filers steer toward individual judges, expect recurring structural interventions — rule changes or conference-level review — each time one courtroom absorbs a disproportionate share of national patent dockets.
- The durable pattern is that patent litigation geography tracks judges, not defendants: every tightening in one district displaces filings to the next favorable one, making venue rules the real battleground over troll activity.
The trend: Patent litigation is migrating across Texas districts in pursuit of plaintiff-friendly judges, turning judicial-assignment rules into the decisive lever against troll filings.