U.S. District Court for the Central District of California (Judge James V. Selna)

I'll research this court's patent litigation practice before writing.

Let me dig into local rules, transfer practice, and the tracked cases.

U.S. District Court for the Central District of California — Patent Litigation Profile

Court overview. The Central District of California sits in the Ninth Circuit (patent appeals go to the Federal Circuit) and is the largest federal district in the country by population, with courthouses in Los Angeles, Santa Ana (Ronald Reagan Federal Building, Southern Division) and Riverside (Eastern Division). It has been a leading patent venue for decades: Mark Lemley's study of 2000–2010 filings found the C.D. Cal. with 2,289 patent cases, the most of any district, and Lex Machina's 2013 year-in-review ranked it third nationally with 399 new patent cases behind the Eastern District of Texas and the District of Delaware. I could not verify a current-year (2024–25) filing count from a primary source, but the district has remained a fixture in the top handful of patent venues post-TC Heartland, in part because many frequently sued technology defendants (Amazon, Netflix, Twitter, Apple, Roku) are headquartered there.

Docket reputation. It is not a "rocket docket" in the E.D. Tex./W.D. Tex. sense. Docket Navigator time-to-trial statistics for the C.D. Cal. — filed as exhibits in PTAB proceedings — report a median of about 35 months from filing to trial (average 39, maximum 94, minimum 17) for a January 2022–August 2025 window; a separate 2020–2026 snapshot in another proceeding shows a median of roughly 20 months, so the figure varies significantly with the filters applied. Trial rates are low: a Lex Machina report counted only five patent trials in the district in 2013 (three bench, three jury, one case involving both), and Lemley's earlier work put the trial rate at roughly 1.5% of C.D. Cal. patent cases in 2010. Historically, the district's claim construction record on appeal was weaker than peer venues — David Schwartz's Federal Circuit study of 2000–2008 appeals found 46.3% of 67 C.D. Cal. claim construction rulings reversed, vacated or remanded, the highest rate among the top 13 districts, and Jay Kesan's broader study found C.D. Cal. rulings fully affirmed only 41% of the time. Both datasets are now dated and should be treated as historical context, not a current measure. Transfer practice follows the Ninth Circuit's Jones v. GNC Franchising § 1404(a) factors; defendants regularly move to send cases to the Northern District of California (Netflix did so in Broadcom v. Netflix, No. 8:20-cv-00529-JVS), but I found no reliable published grant-rate statistics for C.D. Cal. transfer motions and will not estimate one.

Local rules and procedures. The district has no district-wide patent local rules. Two structural features define practice instead. First, under Local Rule 3-2(c) and General Order 14-03, intellectual property actions are subject to district-wide assignment, which makes judge-shopping difficult — complaints in the tracked Avago case expressly invoked L.R. 3-2(c) to note the action was "subject to district-wide assignment." Second, patent procedure is largely judge-specific "local-local" rules in the form of individual standing orders. Judge Andrew J. Guilford's Standing Patent Rules are a commonly cited exemplar: they require initial and final infringement and invalidity contentions with a good-cause standard (and redlines) for amendment, tie final contentions to expert reports, and state that supplementation after the S.P.R. deadlines is presumptively prejudicial. Other judges, such as Judge Josephine Staton, have adopted the Northern District of California's Patent Local Rules in modified form with extended timelines. Practice before Judge Selna in the tracked Avago/Broadcom matter followed Patent Local Rule numbering (P.R. 3-1, 3-3, 3-4, 4-1 disclosures and a Joint Claim Construction and Prehearing Statement), plus a technology tutorial and Markman hearing, an order limiting the case to ten claims for initial adjudication and ten jointly identified claim terms for construction, and interim status conferences with stipulated deadline extensions. I could not locate a Selna-specific written patent standing order on the court's public site, so I describe that practice from docket entries rather than a standing order.

Notable tracked cases. Avago Technologies General IP (Singapore) Pte. Ltd. v. Amazon.com, Inc., No. 8:16-cv-01774-JVS-JCGx, was originally assigned to Judge David O. Carter, then reassigned to Judge Selna as a related case; the court held a Markman hearing in August 2017 and the action was dismissed without prejudice on settlement in October 2017 — the tracker lists the outcome as not confirmed. BlackBerry Ltd. v. Twitter, Inc., No. 2:19-cv-01444-GW-KSx (filed Feb. 27, 2019), was decided by Judge George H. Wu, who granted in part and denied in part Twitter's § 101 motion to dismiss the first amended complaint and dismissed claims on the '351 and '929 patents with prejudice, in a ruling coordinated with his concurrent decisions in BlackBerry's parallel suits against Facebook and Snap. The other two tracked matters are less fully documented here: the tracker records XR Communications, LLC (d/b/a Vivato Technologies) v. Ruckus Wireless, Inc. as superseded by a Northern District of California action, and Futurewei Technologies, Inc. v. Acacia Research Corp. (filed April 4, 2012) as dismissed under the first-to-file rule and affirmed on appeal; I could not independently verify the underlying opinions from the sources retrieved, so those descriptions rest on the tracker alone. For context, the district's highest-profile patent and IP matters before Judge Selna include the Broadcom v. Qualcomm litigation (2007 jury verdict of infringement of three Broadcom patents; $19.64 million in damages doubled to $39.3 million for willfulness; injunction and a 2008 civil contempt finding) and the Masimo/Cercacor v. Apple trade secret trial, which ended in a mistrial in May 2023 after the jury deadlocked.

Judges. Judge James V. Selna (Santa Ana, Courtroom 10C) is the anchor of this tracked set, with the Avago/Broadcom v. Amazon, Broadcom v. Qualcomm, Broadcom v. Netflix, Universal Electronics v. Roku and MR Technologies v. Western Digital matters on his docket. Judge George H. Wu handled the BlackBerry trilogy (Twitter, Facebook, Snap) and issued the § 101 rulings in them. Judge John A. Kronstadt is among the district's heaviest patent dockets — Lex Machina data submitted in a 2026 PTAB proceeding lists 455 patent cases before him between 2009 and October 2025, with annual volume declining from 47 (2020) to 7 (year-to-date 2025) — though I could not verify that exhibit against an independent Lex Machina report. Judge Andrew J. Guilford's Standing Patent Rules are the most concrete example of C.D. Cal. judge-level patent procedure, though he is now on senior status and I would not treat his rules as current for newly filed cases without checking the court's site. Notably, no published Lex Machina, Unified Patents, or Reuters analysis surfaced in my searches characterizing individual C.D. Cal. judges as plaintiff- or defendant-friendly, so I make no such characterization here.

Sourcing note: docket and standing-order facts come from PACER/CourtListener filings and the C.D. Cal. website; filing and trial counts come from Lex Machina's 2013 Year in Review, Lemley's venue study, and Docket Navigator statistics reproduced as exhibits in PTAB filings; the Federal Circuit reversal figures come from the Schwartz and Kesan studies as reported in the Daily Journal. Time-to-trial and reversal-rate figures should be re-pulled from current Lex Machina or Docket Navigator data before being relied on for strategic decisions.