D. Minn.

I'll research the District of Minnesota's patent litigation practice before drafting.

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

Court overview. The District of Minnesota sits in the Eighth Circuit, with its principal divisional courthouses in Minneapolis (Diana E. Murphy U.S. Courthouse), St. Paul (Warren E. Burger Federal Building), Duluth, and Fergus Falls. Its patent docket is driven less by forum shopping than by geography: Minnesota is home to 3M, Medtronic, Boston Scientific/Vascular Solutions, Cargill, General Mills, Ecolab, Donaldson, Andersen, Graco, Select Comfort, and Digi International, and those companies' disputes account for much of the district's patent work. Historically the district punched above its weight — a 2010 Finance & Commerce report citing the Stanford IP Litigation Clearinghouse found D. Minn. surpassed in patent filings over the prior decade by only seven districts, and Lex Machina's 2015 report listed 656 D. Minn. patent filings for 2005–2015 (roughly 60/year). That era is over: the recent Lex Machina annual reports show EDTX, WDTX, and D. Del. absorbing more than half of all U.S. patent filings, and D. Minn. no longer ranks among the top venues. I could not verify a precise current annual filing count from a citable public source; treat any specific recent figure as unconfirmed.

Patent docket reputation. D. Minn. is emphatically not a rocket docket. The most frequently cited (though now dated) figures are Lemley's, reported in 2010: about 2.96 years from filing to trial and 1.18 years to overall resolution, placing Minnesota "in the bottom half" of districts on speed, with a plaintiff win rate of 31.6% versus 40.3% in EDTX, and defendants winning roughly twice as many cases as plaintiffs. Earlier Lex Machina data also showed relatively modest median damages in the district. Practitioners quoted in that same reporting described the district's appeal as predictability, high-quality judges, and the absence of "scary judges," not plaintiff-favorable procedures. On transfer motions, the court applies the Eighth Circuit's §1404(a) framework from Terra Int'l, Inc. v. Mississippi Chemical Corp., 119 F.3d 688 (8th Cir. 1997); since TC Heartland (2017), the docket has skewed further toward cases with a genuine Minnesota nexus. I found no published Lex Machina/Unified Patents analysis of D. Minn. transfer grant rates, so I won't characterize them. Patent trials of either kind are rare — most suits here end in settlement, PTAB proceedings, or summary judgment — and the district has no local rule preferring bench over jury trials.

Local rules and procedures. Minnesota has no standalone patent local rules comparable to the E.D. Tex. or N.D. Cal. patent rules. Instead, the court's local rules contain patent-specific disclosure provisions — exchange of infringement claim charts, defendant's prior art statements, plaintiff's responses, expert discovery keyed to claim construction, and a claim construction hearing order specifying whether extrinsic evidence and live testimony will be received — which were the subject of the court's June 2012 local-rule amendments (published redline, mnd.uscourts.gov). Individual judges then enter case-specific pretrial scheduling orders; in practice claim construction is often staged ahead of merits fact discovery, as the parties' filings in Hysitron, Inc. v. MTS Systems Corp., No. 07-cv-01533 (D. Minn.), illustrate. Two rules matter for patent pacing: LR 16.3 requires good cause and a hearing date obtained before a deadline passes to modify a scheduling order, and LR 7.1(j) permits reconsideration only in "compelling circumstances." A distinctive feature is case assignment: patent suits are assigned from a dedicated patent case list rather than a pure random draw. The tracked case reflects this — "Case assigned to Judge Katherine M. Menendez per 3rd/4th Patent list, referred to Magistrate Judge Douglas L. Micko."

Notable cases. The tracked matter, CommWorks Solutions, LLC v. Digi International Inc., No. 0:26-cv-03949 (D. Minn. filed Sept. 9, 2026), is a § 271 action by a patent-assertion entity (CommWorks, which has filed serial campaigns in WDTX and elsewhere, e.g. against Comcast) against a Minnesota-based IoT company — a classic post-TC Heartland local-defendant filing, still at the pleadings stage. Other substantive decisions that illustrate the district's patent practice include 3M Innovative Properties Co. v. Avery Dennison Corp., 185 F. Supp. 2d 1031 (D. Minn. 2002), aff'd in relevant part, 350 F.3d 1361 (Fed. Cir. 2003) (claim construction); Solutran, Inc. v. U.S. Bancorp, 291 F. Supp. 3d 877 (D. Minn. 2017) (Judge Nelson; summary judgment of infringement, § 101 challenge rejected); Graphic Packaging Int'l, LLC v. Inline Packaging, LLC (D. Minn. Oct. 1, 2019) (Judge Tostrud; design-patent claim construction); QXMédical LLC v. Vascular Solutions, LLC, 408 F. Supp. 3d 996 (D. Minn. 2019) (Judge Schiltz; indefiniteness, recapture rule, and divided-infringement issues in a med-device case); T-Rex Property AB v. Cedar Fair, L.P. (D. Minn. June 2, 2017) (Judge Frank; refusing to resolve Alice at the Rule 12(b)(6) stage); and the Regents of the University of Minnesota v. AGA Medical Corp. litigation, an unusually protracted medical-device patent dispute. Bristol-Myers Squibb's dasatinib litigation against Nanocopoeia, No. 0:22-cv-01283 (D. Minn.), is the district's most prominent recent ANDA matter.

Judges. Patent cases concentrate in a subset of the bench. Judge Patrick J. Schiltz has authored significant claim-construction and invalidity opinions (QXMédical). Judge Eric C. Tostrud handles a steady patent docket, including design-patent construction. Judge Katherine M. Menendez is assigned the tracked CommWorks case and handled the BMS/Nanocopoeia claim-construction schedule; she appears frequently on the court's patent list. Judge Susan Richard Nelson authored the Solutran rulings. Judge Joan N. Ericksen (now senior) has a long patent record, including the Select Comfort/Tempur Sealy litigation. On the magistrate side, Judge Leo I. Brisbois is a recurring patent referral judge (the "LIB" suffix on many D. Minn. patent dockets), and Judge Douglas L. Micko is the referral judge in the tracked case. I did not locate published Lex Machina or Unified Patents judge-level analyses characterizing any of these judges as plaintiff- or defendant-leaning, so no such characterization is offered here.

Caveats: docket-size comparisons and time-to-trial figures in this profile rest on dated public datasets (Lex Machina 2015; 2010 press reporting of Lemley's Clearinghouse data). Current-year statistics for D. Minn. patent filings, transfer rates, and trial outcomes were not verifiable from a citable source within this review.