U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon (Portland)

I'll research the court's patent practice before writing.

U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon, Portland Division — Patent Litigation Profile

Court overview. The District of Oregon sits in the Ninth Circuit (patent appeals go to the Federal Circuit), with courthouses in Portland, Eugene, Medford, and Pendleton; the Portland Division carries essentially all of the district's patent filings (3:xx-cv-##### docket series). Patent litigation here is a small, locally driven docket, not a national venue of choice. By way of scale, Justia's IP docket index for the district shows roughly 1,650–1,700 intellectual property filings cumulatively — a figure that spans copyright and trademark as well as patent cases. That is a fraction of the annual patent volume in D. Del., C.D. Cal., N.D. Cal., E.D. Tex., W.D. Tex., or D.N.J. (I could not verify a current Lex Machina/Unified Patents patent-complaint count for this district; treat any specific per-year number with caution. AOUSC Federal Court Management Statistics and the USPTO's annual patent litigation docket report are the appropriate sources to confirm.)

Docket reputation. Oregon is not a "rocket docket" and is not widely characterized as a plaintiff-favorite forum. The most commonly cited empirical snapshot remains the older SSRN study Where to File Your Patent Case, which recorded 251 patent outcomes in the District of Oregon with 8 cases reaching trial (3.2%), a 45.2% win rate for claimants among tried cases, and a 2.07-year time to trial. That dataset is dated (pre-2010 outcomes) and should not be read as current. Practically, the more telling feature is case composition: filings cluster around Oregon-headquartered operating companies suing competitors and former partners (Tektronix, Mentor Graphics, InVue, PASCO Scientific, SawStop, USNR, Nike/adidas-related entities). There is little evidence of the district functioning as a magnet for non-practicing-entity filings. Reported patent trials are rare, and when they occur they are typically jury trials (the Mentor Graphics case below was tried to a jury), with bench trials generally confined to declaratory-judgment and equitable issues. Public, Oregon-specific data on § 1404(a) transfer grant rates is thin, and I would not assert a trend either way; the district does appear as a transferee destination for defendants with Oregon operations. A concrete illustration is the Planar Systems dispute, in which E.D. Tex. conditionally granted transfer to Oregon but continued to conduct claim construction under E.D. Tex. rules for roughly two years before the case moved — the transferee court then had to sort out which district's procedures governed.

Local rules and procedures. The District of Oregon has no district-wide local patent rules of the N.D. Cal. / E.D. Tex. / W.D. Wash. variety, and no standing district patent case-management order comparable to the W.D. Tex. claim-construction order. Patent scheduling is therefore judge-specific and negotiated case by case. In Google Inc. v. Traffic Information LLC (D. Or. 2010), the magistrate judge resolved competing party proposals by adopting the N.D. Cal. Patent Local Rules framework — infringement contentions, invalidity contentions, joint claim construction chart, simultaneous Markman briefs, Markman hearing — which is a useful illustration of how Oregon judges import another district's patent rules by order rather than by local rule. Two general local rules matter a great deal in practice: LR 7-1(a)(1) requires every motion's first paragraph to certify a good-faith personal or telephone conferral (email alone and last-minute calls do not satisfy it), and judges enforce it, including by denying non-compliant motions; and LR 16-2(c) governs case-management conference requests. Under LR 72-1, 73-1, and 73-2, magistrate judges receive civil cases off the same wheel as Article III judges, preside through dispositive motions absent full consent, and can offer earlier, firmer trial dates; consent rates are reported to be high. At least one judge (Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai) maintains a standing order offering an expedited case-management track with trial targeted within six months of the expedited conference when the parties consent to magistrate-judge jurisdiction. The court's website publishes each judge's courtroom rules and case-management preferences, which function as the de facto procedural playbook.

Notable cases and rulings. The district's most consequential patent case is Mentor Graphics Corp. v. EVE-USA, Inc./Synopsys (D. Or., Judge Michael W. Mosman, No. 3:10-cv-00954-MO), a semiconductor emulation dispute in which a jury awarded Mentor roughly $36.4 million in lost profits plus royalties. The Federal Circuit's decision, 851 F.3d 1275 (Fed. Cir. 2017), is nationally cited on three points: assignor estoppel survived Lear; satisfaction of the Panduit factors can itself satisfy apportionment for lost profits (rehearing en banc denied over a dissent by Judges Dyk and Hughes); and a willfulness case cannot be barred merely because the patentee did not seek a preliminary injunction. Also on the docket: Google Inc. v. Traffic Information LLC (D. Or. 2009–2010, declaratory judgment and the source of the scheduling order described above), and recent competitor-versus-competitor filings such as PASCO Scientific v. Vernier Software & Technology (D. Or. 2021), SawStop Holding LLC v. Felder KG, USNR, LLC v. American Wood Dryers, and Ernst Manufacturing v. Toolbox Widget (all 2024). The three cases tracked on this site are consistent with that pattern: Furuno Electric Co. v. Honeywell International (filed 2011, dismissed), and two InVue Security Products v. Mobile Tech actions (2019 and later), the first of which settled.

Judges. Reliably sourced names on the district's patent bench include Judge Michael W. Mosman (author of the key post-trial rulings in Mentor Graphics, now a senior judge), Judge Michael H. Simon, Judge Marco A. Hernández, and Judge Karin J. Immergut (who presided over PASCO Scientific v. Vernier Software); these three appear in the district's CM-ECF judge-code appendix (codes SI, HZ, and IM). Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai is the source of the expedited-trial standing order discussed above. I found no published Lex Machina, Unified Patents, or Reuters analysis designating any Oregon judge as plaintiff- or defendant-friendly, and I would not characterize them that way without one.