U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina, Florence Division

I'll research the court's patent litigation profile before writing.

Court overview. The U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina, Florence Division, sits at the J.L. McMillan Federal Building in Florence, S.C., and draws cases from Chesterfield, Darlington, Dillon, Florence, Horry, Marion, Marlboro, and Williamsburg counties — the remnants of the old Eastern District of South Carolina, consolidated into a single statewide district in 1965 (28 U.S.C. § 121; Pub. L. 89-242; SCD court divisions page). Appeals go to the Fourth Circuit, except patent appeals, which go to the Federal Circuit under 28 U.S.C. § 1295. D.S.C. as a whole is a small patent venue: it is not among the districts that appear at the top of national patent-filing rankings in Lex Machina's published patent litigation reports (which are dominated by E.D. Tex., D. Del., W.D. Tex., C.D. Cal., and similar venues). I could not verify a Florence-Division-specific patent filing count from a reliable published source, and the site's own tracker shows only a single dispute here, so any statement about docket volume should be treated as directional rather than measured.

Patent docket reputation. Nothing in the sources reviewed supports describing Florence (or D.S.C. generally) as a "rocket docket," and there is no published Lex Machina/Unified Patents analysis, that I could locate, characterizing the district as plaintiff-friendly. Patent cases here are typically local-industry disputes — the tracked matter pits a Carlsbad, California medtech company against a South Carolina spine-implant maker — rather than high-volume assertion campaigns by serial plaintiffs, which is consistent with a low-volume, non-magnet venue. I could not source district-specific figures on median time-to-trial in patent cases, Markman timing, or grant rates on § 1404(a)/§ 1406(a) transfer motions; post-TC Heartland, transfer practice in low-volume districts like this one is generally driven by the defendant's physical presence and the convenience factors, but I have no D.S.C.-specific published study to cite. Likewise, I found no reliable data on the jury-versus-bench split for patent trials in this district; jury demands are routine, but patent trials to verdict here appear to be rare, with most cases terminating earlier.

Local rules and procedures. D.S.C. has no district-wide local patent rules and no standing claim-construction order comparable to E.D. Tex.'s Patent Rules or W.D. Tex.'s procedures. Instead, patent case management is judge-specific: scheduling orders impose infringement contentions, invalidity/non-infringement contentions, exchange of claim terms, and a joint claim construction statement on a case-by-case basis, and counsel frequently propose adopting the Local Patent Rules of another district. In one D.S.C. patent scheduling order (No. 3:23-cv-5890-JDA), the parties proposed "generally following the pretrial schedule set forth in the Local Patent Rules for the Western District of North Carolina," with the court adopting that framework. General civil practice features matter too: local counsel must sign all pleadings for pro hac vice counsel (Local Civ. R. 83.I.04), sealing requires a motion with public docket notice (LR 5.03), replies are expressly "discouraged" (LR 7.07), motions are decided on the papers with oral argument discretionary, and mediation is channeled through a structured ADR framework (LR 16.04–16.11) — practices summarized in third-party rule compilations such as LawSnap's SC-D court guide.

Notable cases. The tracked docket consists of one dispute: Carlsmed, Inc. v. DeGen Medical, Inc., filed September 15, 2026 in the Florence Division, case No. 4:26-cv-04064, asserting eight Carlsmed patents covering spinal implants, methods, and systems and seeking injunctive relief and damages (GlobeNewswire/press coverage; PacerMonitor docket). DeGen's CEO publicly disputed the allegations and stated the company would "vigorously defend" (Becker's Spine Review). The tracker lists this as two entries — one "active" and one "pending" — which appear to be the same filing rather than two separate suits. Historically, the Florence Division's patent docket has been thin; reported decisions are dominated by older cases such as Blaw-Knox Co. v. Hartsville Oil Mill, 269 F. Supp. 205 (D.S.C. 1967) (Florence Division), rather than a body of recent substantive Federal Circuit-reviewed patent rulings.

Judges. Patent cases are assigned to the district's Article III judges; the Florence-based judges include R. Bryan Harwell (Chief Judge 2019–2024, now senior; chambers in Florence since 2004) and Joseph Dawson III (Florence, appointed 2020), who is the assigned judge in Carlsmed v. DeGen per the docket. Other judges who have handled patent matters in the district include Terry L. Wooten (Columbia, former Chief Judge), and Sherri A. Lydon (Columbia), whose chambers are referenced in the D.S.C. form scheduling/confidentiality materials used in patent cases. A Florence judgeship vacancy following Harwell's move to senior status has been pending, with a nominee reported in 2026 (Wikipedia's district-judge table); I would treat appointment details from that source as unverified. I did not find published Lex Machina, Unified Patents, or Reuters analysis attributing plaintiff- or defendant-friendly tendencies to any individual D.S.C. judge, so this profile deliberately does not characterize any of them.

Sourcing note: court structure, courthouse, and division composition are from the D.S.C. website and the U.S. Code; the Carlsmed/DeGen details are from the parties' press statements and a docket aggregator; the patent scheduling framework is from a D.S.C. scheduling order via CourtListener and a third-party Local Civil Rules summary. Where district-level patent statistics (filings, time-to-trial, transfer grant rates) were unavailable from those sources, I have said so rather than estimate.