D. Del., Judge Richard G. Andrews

I'll research the District of Delaware's patent practice, Judge Andrews's track record, and recent developments.

Let me research Delaware's local patent rules, time-to-trial data, and the specific tracked cases.

Let me verify Judge Andrews's current status, the tracked cases, and Delaware's transfer/time-to-trial reputation.

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

Court overview. The U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware (D. Del.) sits in Wilmington and is in the Third Circuit; Federal Circuit law governs its patent merits questions. It has four authorized active district judgeships, currently held by Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly and Judges Maryellen Noreika, Gregory B. Williams, and Jennifer L. Hall, with Judge Richard G. Andrews on senior status — verify current composition against the court's website, as retirements and elevations have been frequent. By volume it is one of the two or three busiest patent districts. RPX's 2025 year-end data ranks D. Del. second for overall patent litigation (23% of defendants added, 1,235), first for operating-company suits, and third for NPE suits; RPX's Q1 2026 review put roughly a quarter of all patent case filings in Delaware. Docket Navigator data cited by DLA Piper shows 4,526 national patent filings in 2025, up from 3,120 in 2023. Note that published district shares differ by metric: Lex Machina's 2025 report gives D. Del. about 11.4% of case filings, behind the Western and Eastern Districts of Texas. Delaware's pull is structural — many defendants are Delaware corporations — not merely a matter of judicial reputation.

Docket reputation. Delaware is not a "rocket docket" in the E.D. Tex. mold. A 2025 PTAB petition citing Docket Navigator data put D. Del.'s median time-to-trial at roughly 40 months, and the docket is characterized by heavy motions practice and a large share of cases resolved by stipulated or voluntary dismissal rather than verdict. Its docket mix skews toward operating companies and Hatch-Waxman/ANDA pharmaceutical litigation, which is tried to the bench; older Lex Machina data (2013) showed D. Del. patent trials running 17 bench to 8 jury, and the bench-heavy pattern persists because of the pharma docket. Filings against NPEs fell after the Supreme Court's TC Heartland decision and after Chief Judge Connolly's 2022 disclosure standing orders, which RPX credits with driving IP Edge and other NPEs out of the district. On transfer: §1404(a) motion practice is a major feature of the docket, but I did not find a current, reliably sourced D. Del.-specific transfer-grant rate, and I would not quote one. Published Lex Machina/Unified Patents analyses I found did not support labeling individual D. Del. judges as systematically plaintiff- or defendant-friendly; the more defensible statement is that Delaware is broadly viewed as a more balanced venue than the Texas districts.

Local rules and procedures. Delaware has no patent local rules comparable to E.D. Tex.'s or N.D. Cal.'s. Practice is governed instead by (1) the district's Local Rules, including the L.R. 83.5(d) requirement that Delaware counsel be admitted and file all papers, and L.R. 7.1.3 page/word limits; (2) the district's Default Standard for Discovery (revised 2011, covering ESI, proportional preservation, custodian lists, and initial patent disclosures) and a companion Default Standard for Access to Source Code; and (3) judge-specific Rule 16 scheduling and procedural orders with fill-in-the-blank dates. The typical Delaware schedule requires early identification of accused products and a damages model, core technical documents, initial infringement contentions, initial invalidity contentions, and a joint claim construction brief built from unfiled opening/answering/reply/sur-reply sections in a prescribed format, with a technology tutorial and no live testimony at the Markman hearing absent leave. Scheduling orders commonly state that the court will aim to issue its claim construction order within 60 days of the hearing. Judge Andrews's procedural order limits plaintiff's opening claim construction brief to 5,000 words and defendant's answering brief to 7,500 words. Two district-wide standing orders matter procedurally: the May 17, 2024 Standing Order on Personal Devices, and Chief Judge Connolly's April 2022 standing orders requiring disclosure of corporate ownership/control and third-party litigation funding (applying only to cases assigned to him).

Notable tracked cases and rulings. Greenthread, LLC v. Monolithic Power Systems, Inc. was stayed and administratively closed pending PTAB inter partes reviews — a common disposition path in Delaware. Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. v. Infinova Corporation (filed 2021) ended in voluntary dismissal, typical of Cedar Lane's high-volume campaign docket. Among Judge Andrews's publicly reported rulings: on January 21, 2026, he granted Novartis summary judgment in the Entresto litigation against MSN, holding that issue and claim preclusion barred MSN from relitigating claim construction, validity, and infringement decided in an earlier case; on August 27, 2025, he issued a rare district-court interference trial opinion in RSB Spine v. DePuy Synthes, finding no interference-in-fact for DePuy, following a 2022 jury verdict of roughly $12 million for RSB Spine; and in March 2026 he declined to dismiss New Directions Technology Consulting v. Abbott. The blog ipde.com's 2025 §101 year-in-review tally attributes to Judge Andrews five §101 motions and nine of nine patents invalidated — a blog aggregation, not an independently audited statistic.

Judges. Beyond Judge Andrews, the most prominent patent hands are Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly (2022 litigation-funding and ownership-disclosure orders; the IP Edge investigation), Judge Maryellen Noreika, Judge Gregory B. Williams, and Judge Jennifer L. Hall, who was elevated from magistrate judge in 2024. Magistrate judges carry much of the discovery and §101 workload; Christopher J. Burke is a long-serving D. Del. magistrate judge whose initials appear on many patent scheduling and discovery orders. One caveat on Judge Andrews's current role: ipde.com's report on the 2025 D. Del. Bench & Bar conference states that, since taking senior status on December 31, 2023, he is no longer taking new patent cases, while a June 2025 Federal Bar Association report said he was still carrying nearly a full caseload — those accounts conflict, and his existing patent cases (including the tracked ones above) remain before him.