U.S. District Judge Alan Albright<\/a> handling 4.4% of patent cases, U.S. District Judge Walter Counts III handling 4.3% and U.S. District Judge Robert Schroeder III handling 3.2%. U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman rounded out the top 10 with 1.9%.\u00a0<\/p>\nBut those numbers are bound to change in the next edition of the Lex Machina report. Albright, a former patent lawyer who became a judge in 2018 and quickly turned his Waco courtroom into a hotspot for the complex cases, joined A&O Shearman\u2019s Austin office as an IP litigation partner earlier this month.<\/p>\n
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\u201cMy best guess is that filings will trail down, because even if some of the [new] judges show a brilliance in managing patent cases \u2026 those judges still have such a small percentage of that respective docket in their division that it\u2019s an enormous risk to file there,\u201d Smith said. \u201cI think it\u2019s likely that a lot of plaintiffs will be going somewhere else if they can.\u201d<\/p>\n
After patent filings surged in the single-judge division where Albright sat, the chief judge issued a standing order requiring patent cases be equitably distributed among all judges in the district.<\/p>\n
The number of patent cases Judge Albright was assigned took a dip after that, and dipped further after a subsequent order prevented follow-on cases from being assigned to Judge Albright. But Smith said when the jurist decided to move his chambers to Austin last year, he \u201cdisproportionately got a huge number of patent cases pending in Austin.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe order that required districtwide assignment of patent cases in Waco \u2026 didn\u2019t apply to patent cases filed in Austin,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Two new judges have been confirmed to benches in the Western District of Texas, former Tarrant County District Judge Christopher Wolfe sits in Waco, and Andrew Davis, a former partner at Lehotsky Keller Cohn, sits in Austin. Neither judge has \u201csignificant expertise in patent litigation,\u201d Smith said.<\/p>\n
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For Anaipakos and other intellectual property lawyers, the next 18 months will largely be a wait-and-see period for how patent litigation is handled in the Western District of Texas.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Western District of Texas is increasingly housing very large tech companies \u2014 Tesla, Apple and a lot of significant players who will be involved in patent litigation,\u201d he said. \u201cSo, one would expect the Western District would become a busy venue simply because the other venues remain unattractive.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Texas Lawbook is an online news publication focused on business law in Texas. For more legal news, visit texaslawbook.net.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FILE – Apple’s App Store icon is displayed on an iPad in Baltimore, March 19, 2018. (AP Photo\/Patrick…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":438764,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,29,28],"class_list":["post-438763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/438764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}