D. Nev.

I'll research the District of Nevada's patent litigation practice before writing.

Let me dig into docket size, judges, transfer practice, and the tracked case.

U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada (D. Nev.)

Court overview. The District of Nevada sits in Las Vegas (the largest division) with a second division in Reno, and is the only federal district court for the state. Civil appeals go to the Ninth Circuit, but patent appeals, and Tucker Act claims, go to the Federal Circuit — a split worth noting for case-strategy purposes. The district has roughly a dozen active and senior district judges plus a magistrate bench; the chief judge is Andrew P. Gordon (he signed orders as Chief Judge in December 2025, succeeding Miranda Du, who held the post 2019–2024 per Wikipedia's judge table). In patent terms it is a small-to-mid venue. A Lex Machina-based study of 2014–2016 filings by Prof. Marketa Trimble (UNLV) put Nevada at 28, 29, and 41 new patent cases in those years against a U.S. average (excluding E.D. Tex.) of roughly 32–40, ranking it 27th, 27th, and 18th among the 94 districts. Recent Unified Patents annual reporting shows the same picture from the other direction: the 2025 docket was led by E.D. Tex. (27.7%), W.D. Tex., D. Del., and N.D. Ill., with Nevada not among the leading venues. So: a real but second-tier patent docket, not a high-volume hub.

Patent docket reputation. I found no published Lex Machina, Unified Patents, or RPX analysis characterizing D. Nev. as a "rocket docket," and none characterizing it as plaintiff- or defendant-friendly, so I won't assert either. It is not one of the districts plaintiffs' bar treat as a speed venue on the order of E.D. Tex. or W.D. Tex., and I could not verify a median time-to-trial figure for patent cases here from a citable source — treat any such number as unverified. On transfer practice, the local record shows § 1404(a) motions are seriously litigated rather than reflexively granted: in Tomahawk Manufacturing, Inc. v. Spherical Industries, Inc., No. 2:23-cv-01007-APG-NJK (D. Nev.), Chief Judge Gordon denied the defendants' motion to transfer to the District of Oregon on Dec. 5, 2025, emphasizing that the case was already past summary judgment with trial set for February 2026. That said, a single ruling is not a statistical pattern, and Nevada's relatively thin connection to many accused products means forum motions recur. On jury versus bench trials and claim-construction outcomes, I found no reliable published breakdown for this district; the one clear institutional fact is that the local rules contemplate a full Markman process, including a claim construction hearing (see below).

Local rules and procedures. D. Nev. has its own Local Rules of Practice for Patent Cases (LPRs), which the district substantially revised effective April 17, 2020. They carry the familiar architecture: LPR 1-6 initial disclosure of asserted claims and infringement contentions; LPR 1-8 non-infringement, invalidity, and unenforceability contentions (with claim charts, § 101 statements, and § 112 grounds); LPR 1-9 accompanying document production; LPR 1-10 responses; and joint claim construction and prehearing statements with exchange of proposed terms and preliminary constructions. Two points matter in practice. First, the LPRs are expressly modeled on the N.D. Cal. and E.D. Tex. patent rules, and Nevada judges treat decisions from those districts as persuasive; Silver State Intellectual Technologies, Inc. v. Garmin Int'l, Inc., 32 F. Supp. 3d 1155 (D. Nev. 2014), recognized the N.D. Cal. design, and courts routinely apply the Genentech "shifting sands" rationale to hold amendment of claim charts to a conservative standard. Second, LPR 1-18a — added in the 2020 revision — permits amendment of contentions as a matter of right within 30 days of a claim construction order, distinct from LPR 1-12, which requires good cause. Applications in Internet Time, LLC v. Salesforce, Inc., No. 3:13-cv-00628-RCJ-VPC (D. Nev. Mar. 30, 2022), and INAG, Inc. v. Richar, LLC, No. 2:16-cv-00722-RFB-EJY (D. Nev. Apr. 22, 2021), both read 1-18a that way. I did not find a district-wide standing order that differs materially from the LPRs.

Notable cases and rulings. The highest-profile patent matter to originate here is Halo Electronics, Inc. v. Pulse Electronics, Inc., which reached the Supreme Court from the District of Nevada via the Federal Circuit, 579 U.S. 93 (2016), and displaced the Seagate test for enhanced damages — the single most consequential ruling to come out of this docket. Silver State Intellectual Technologies v. Garmin (D. Nev. 2014) is the district's leading local-patent-rules decision on the "shifting sands" problem. On the gaming-technology side, the District of Nevada has hosted ongoing litigation between Evolution Malta/SIA Evolution Latvia and Light & Wonder, filed May 2024, involving patent claims over roulette-style games; per Light & Wonder's SEC disclosure, the court dismissed the patent infringement claims on February 11, 2025, and the case has continued on trade secret and other theories with a fact discovery deadline in October 2026. The tracked case on this site, Lab Technology LLC v. TELUS International (U.S.) Corp., No. 2:26-cv-00127 (D. Nev., filed Jan. 21, 2026), is at an early stage; plaintiff's counsel of record includes Isaac Rabicoff (Rabicoff Law LLC), a firm associated with high-volume patent assertion, and docket aggregators show a companion GeoSymm Ventures LLC v. TELUS International (U.S.) Corp., No. 2:25-cv-02521, plus what appears to be a duplicate Lab Technology filing at No. 2:26-cv-00284. That pattern — small NPE plaintiffs filing short, related complaints against a single corporate defendant — is a recurring but modest contributor to Nevada's docket; the aggregator data is not authoritative, so treat the companion-case link as indicative rather than confirmed.

Judges. Judge Gloria M. Navarro (Las Vegas) has historically carried the district's largest patent docket — the Lex Machina-based UNLV study counted 33 patent cases filed 2010–2013 in her docket, the most of any judge in the district — and she authored the LPR good-cause/amendment ruling in AIM High Investment Group, LLC v. Spectrum Laboratories, LLC (D. Nev. 2024). Judge Miranda M. Du (Reno) and then-Chief Judge Andrew P. Gordon (Las Vegas) were also among the district's busier patent judges in that period, and Gordon handled the Halo v. Bel Fuse docket per RPX and issued the December 2025 transfer denial in Tomahawk. Judge Richard F. Boulware II (Las Vegas) authored the INAG decision applying LPR 1-18a. The district was a participant in the federal Patent Pilot Program from its 2011 inception, with Judges Navarro, Du, Robert C. Jones, and Philip M. Pro as the designated patent judges; that program has since sunset, and I could not verify current internal case-assignment practices for patent matters. Magistrate judges (including the EJY, VCF, and NKK dockets) handle a substantial share of the LPR discovery and contention-dispute work, so they are often the practical decision-makers on early procedural motions.

A note on sourcing: the docket-size figures above come from Lex Machina data as reported in academic and industry summaries rather than a current pull, and I have not verified 2024–2026 Nevada filing counts from a primary source. Judge counts, chief-judge tenure, and current Patent Pilot Program status should be confirmed against the district's own website before relying on them.