United States District Court of Delaware

I'll research the current state of Delaware's patent docket before writing.

Let me verify judge names, transfer practice, and time-to-trial data.

Let me check the Sampo IP cases and current D. Del. patent statistics.

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

Court overview. The District of Delaware sits in the Third Circuit, with its courthouse in Wilmington (J. Caleb Boggs Federal Building, 844 N. King St.). It is a four-judge district that carries a national patent load far out of proportion to its size — Delaware was the busiest district court overall in 2024 per the Administrative Office's report, and the court's own bench-and-bar reporting puts patent filings up roughly 22% in 2025 (ipde.com, 2025 Bench & Bar notes). RPX ranked it second among all districts in 2024 for total patent litigation (about 12% of defendants added) and first for operating-company litigation (about 19%), behind only the Eastern District of Texas in overall volume (RPX Q4 2024 in Review). Its docket share is a post-TC Heartland phenomenon: with venue tied to the state of incorporation for domestic corporations, Delaware's corporate-registration base makes it a default forum for many defendants.

Docket reputation. Delaware is not a "rocket docket" of the E.D. Tex./W.D. Tex. mold; its appeal is expertise, developed venue law, and a deep bench of experienced patent jurists rather than speed. It is a comparatively transfer-friendly venue. A Docket Navigator dataset cited in a comparative study showed § 1404(a) transfer motions in D. Del. succeeding 12% (2018), 33% (2019), 45% (2020) and 33% (2021) — a 31% cumulative rate (JIPA comparative study); an Orrick analysis of Third Circuit venue rulings found Delaware judges granting 14 and denying 9 motions in its review window (Orrick, Patent Venue Wars). Incorporation in Delaware is no longer a complete shield: In re Link_A_Media Devices Corp. (Fed. Cir. 2011) rejected the view that a defendant's Delaware incorporation plus plaintiff's forum choice forecloses transfer. Claim construction is decided by the judge, not a jury, as everywhere; Delaware judges typically hold a single Markman hearing per case and set claim-construction deadlines by individual standing order. Patent trials are mixed — jury trials dominate infringement actions, while Hatch-Waxman/ANDA litigation, a large slice of the Delaware docket, is tried to the bench. I could not verify a current, well-sourced median time-to-trial figure for patent cases in this district; treat any specific number with caution.

Local rules and procedures. Delaware has no formal local patent rules like those in E.D. Tex. or N.D. Cal. Instead it relies on the court's Default Standard for Discovery, Including Discovery of Electronically Stored Information, adopted by most judges, which stages initial disclosures: identification of accused products and asserted patents, core technical documents, initial infringement claim charts, and initial invalidity contentions, with final infringement and invalidity contentions due 21 and 42 days after the claim construction order respectively (see, e.g., D. Del. scheduling order text). Judges layer on individual standing orders and procedural orders that fix briefing limits (e.g., Judge Noreika's 20-page opening / 30-page answering limits; Judge Andrews' 5,000/7,500-word limits) and, in most cases, a two-stage narrowing of asserted claims and prior-art references before and after Markman (Federal Circuit Bar-related academic review; ipde.com). Delaware procedure is strictly enforced — Judge Andrews denied a partial summary-judgment motion in Jackson v. NuVasive (C.A. No. 21-53-RGA, Mar. 14, 2025) largely for failure to comply with Local Rule 7.1.3(c)(1)(D)'s summary-of-argument requirement (Lexology). The most distinctive Delaware practice is Chief Judge Connolly's April 2022 standing orders requiring disclosure of corporate ownership/control and third-party litigation funding — the trigger for the IP Edge/MAVEXAR investigation, which in December 2023 produced findings of fraud and ethical violations and referrals to DOJ, the USPTO, and state disciplinary authorities (RPX Q4 2024; RPX Q3 2024). RPX reports that IP Edge stopped filing in Delaware in late 2022 under that pressure and that the district's NPE share fell sharply as a result, while operating-company litigation remained strong.

Notable tracked cases. All five cases this site tracks at the court are the Sampo IP, LLC campaign filed February 7, 2014 (announced February 10): Sampo IP, LLC v. Facebook Inc. (1:14-cv-00173), v. Intuit Inc. (1:14-cv-00174), v. Amazon.com, Inc. (1:14-cv-00171), v. LinkedIn Corp. (1:14-cv-00175), and v. eBay Inc. (1:14-cv-00172). Sampo, a wholly owned subsidiary of Marathon Patent Group, asserted U.S. Patent Nos. 6,772,229, 6,161,149 and 8,015,495 ("Centrifugal Communication and Collaboration Method"), with Mishcon de Reya New York LLP as counsel; all five were assigned to Judge Gregory M. Sleet (GlobeNewswire release; Justia docket). The campaign is a textbook pre-TC Heartland illustration of Delaware's earlier role as the default NPE venue: sue a cluster of Delaware-registered technology companies in one court on the same small patent family. Broader public trends at the court today center on the third-party-funding disclosure fight, the resulting decline in NPE filings, the district's dominance in competitor and Hatch-Waxman litigation, and heavy use of visiting judges to absorb the caseload.

Judges. Prominent patent jurists currently sitting: Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly (author of the ownership and litigation-funding standing orders; roughly 359 patent cases 2022–2024 in a Lex Machina-derived tally reproduced here), Judge Maryellen Noreika (~341), Judge Gregory B. Williams (~277), and Judge Jennifer L. Hall (~185), who joined in 2024 and whose docket is growing fastest. Senior Judge Richard G. Andrews (~349) took senior status and, per the court's 2025 bench-and-bar report, is no longer taking patent cases. Note that the tracked Sampo cases were assigned to Judge Gregory M. Sleet, who retired in 2017 — an early data point in the district's long-running judicial-vacancy and workload story, which the court says continues to drive reliance on visiting judges (ipde.com). I found no published Lex Machina, Unified Patents, or Reuters analysis in the sources reviewed that characterizes any sitting Delaware judge as systematically plaintiff- or defendant-friendly, so none is asserted here.

Caveats. Judge-level patent case counts above come from a secondary reproduction of analytics data and may cover different case definitions than the totals this site tracks. No verified, current median time-to-trial or win-rate figure for D. Del. patent cases was available in the sources reviewed.