E.D. Tex. (Marshall)

I'll verify the court's current profile with targeted searches before writing.

Good baseline. Now let me verify judges, local rules, and transfer practice specifics.

Let me verify the tracked cases' judge and dig into transfer/settlement statistics.

E.D. Tex. (Marshall Division) — Patent Litigation Profile

Court overview. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas sits in the Fifth Circuit; patent appeals go to the Federal Circuit. It is organized into six divisions — Beaumont, Lufkin, Marshall, Sherman, Texarkana and Tyler — plus an additional courthouse in Plano. The Marshall Division (Harrison County, a town of roughly 25,000) is the district's best-known patent venue. Lex Machina reported that E.D. Tex. led all districts in new patent filings in both 2023 and 2024, with roughly 1,050–1,150 patent matters in 2024 — about 20% of U.S. patent filings by case count (Lex Machina) and 33% by defendants added (RPX, 1,138). Trade-press summaries of Docket Navigator/IAM data put the district at roughly 1,248 patent filings in 2025 (~28% of the national total). It has held the top district spot since Q2 2023 (RPX).

Patent docket reputation. E.D. Tex. earned the "rocket docket" label from Judge T. John Ward's streamlined patent rules adopted around 2000, including fixed trial-time budgets (the "chess clock"); reported filings grew from 14 patent cases in 1999 to roughly 2,540 at the district's 2015 peak. TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods (2017) and In re Cray (Fed. Cir. 2017) sharply reduced filings, but the district rebounded as Delaware's disclosure rule changes and the Western District of Texas's move to random case assignment in 2023 depressed NPE filings in those venues. On speed, Docket Navigator data cited by IAM showed E.D. Tex. with the shortest median time to jury verdict, about 21 months in 2024 against a ~37-month national average; party briefs in PTAB proceedings, by contrast, cite a ~25-month median time-to-trial for one Marshall judge and note frequent trial-date slippage. Transfer practice is widely described as restrictive: the Federal Circuit denied SAP America's April 2025 mandamus petition seeking to move a case from Marshall to the Sherman Division (Law360/MLex). Note that these characterizations come from competing advocacy documents and trade summaries; I did not verify a district-wide transfer-grant rate from a primary statistical source. Patent trials here are predominantly jury trials.

Local rules and procedures. The district's Local Patent Rules (P.R. 3-1 through 3-6) require infringement contentions before the initial case management conference, invalidity contentions under P.R. 3-3, a joint claim construction statement under P.R. 4-3, and completion of claim construction discovery 30 days later (P.R. 4-4). P.R. 3-6 allows amended contentions without leave within 30 days (patentee) or 50 days (accused infringer) of the claim construction ruling; Appendix C's software-specific modifications (P.R. 3-1(g), 3-3(e)) defer source-code contentions until 30 days after source code is produced. Separately, the district adopted a Model Order Focusing Patent Claims and Prior Art (Oct. 29, 2013) as an appendix — not as a local rule — capping preliminary elections at 10 claims/32 total and 12 references/40 total, and final elections at 5 claims/16 total and 6 references/20 total. Judges apply it case-by-case: in Morris Routing Technologies v. AT&T (E.D. Tex. Apr. 2, 2025, Judge Sean D. Jordan), the court ordered 60 claims per defendant and 70 prior art references across four related cases and directed future compliance with the Model Order.

Notable cases and trends. The three tracked matters are the Sol IP, LLC cases filed December 3, 2018 and consolidated into lead case 2:18-cv-00526. The record shows the lead case was captioned Sol IP, LLC v. AT&T Mobility LLC and also named Sprint Communications/Sprint Solutions/Sprint Spectrum and Cellco Partnership (Verizon Wireless), with Ericsson and Nokia intervening. Sol IP asserted a large portfolio of LTE/4G patents it had acquired from Korea's ETRI electronics research institute — 20+ patents, grouped by the court into "LTE A," "LTE B" and "WiFi" sets with multiple claim construction rounds (including a December 5, 2019 hearing) and FRAND-related discovery. The court granted leave to add doctrine-of-equivalents contentions but struck Sol IP's "catch-all" identification of accused devices as contrary to P.R. 3-1(b). Among broader trends, Marshall parties frequently report post-IPR-institution stays even months before trial (Resonant Systems v. Samsung, 2024; Broadphone, 2024; Harbor Island Dynamic, 2025), and 2025 produced several large plaintiff verdicts in the district (firm CLE summaries list Headwater Research v. Verizon and Pictiva Displays v. Samsung, though I did not confirm those figures against primary dockets).

Judges. Judge J. Rodney Gilstrap (Marshall) is the dominant patent judge: Lex Machina and Docket Navigator figures report roughly 793–799 new patent cases assigned to him in 2024 (about 21% of all U.S. patent suits) and about 1,018 in 2025 (roughly 82% of the district's total). Magistrate Judge Roy S. Payne (Marshall) handles many Markman hearings and pretrial conferences. The tracked Sol IP cases carried the "RWS" suffix, indicating assignment to Judge Robert W. Schroeder III (Texarkana) with Judge Payne as magistrate. Other district judges with active civil/patent dockets include Chief Judge Amos Mazzant and Judge Sean D. Jordan (Sherman/Plano), Judges J. Campbell Barker and Jeremy Kernodle (Tyler), and Judges Marcia Crone and Michael Truncale (Beaumont), per the district's 2025 bench-bar materials.

Sourcing note: figures above are drawn from Lex Machina's 2025 patent report as summarized by Finnegan/Law360 and Berkeley Law; RPX data bytes on 2024 filings; an IAM/Docket Navigator summary as reported in IP Daily; the E.D. Tex. Local Rules and Model Order (court website and law-firm summaries); the 2025 E.D. Tex. Bench Bar Conference schedule; Federal Circuit/Law360 reporting on the SAP mandamus denial; and the docket and opinion records in the Sol IP and Morris Routing matters. Where a number appears only in a party brief or a law-firm presentation, I have flagged it as such rather than stating it as established.