Federal court in Massachusetts

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

Court overview

The U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts (D. Mass.) sits in the First Circuit, with its principal courthouse in Boston (John Joseph Moakley U.S. Courthouse) and additional divisions in Worcester and Springfield. Patent appeals go to the Federal Circuit under 28 U.S.C. § 1295, not to the First Circuit. The patent docket is mid-sized rather than a volume venue: Lex Machina data cited by IPWatchdog put D. Mass. at 71 new patent cases in 2010 (2.53% of the national total, 8th among districts), and a Lex Machina series reported in the Boston Business Journal showed 101 new patent filings in 2017 falling to 59 in 2018 after the 2018 local-rule overhaul (Finnegan summary, Morgan Lewis deck). A third-party LegalMetric district report circulating in PTAB filings counted 279 patent cases assigned to then-active judges, 128 of them in the preceding three years — these are vendor analytics, not AOUSC official counts, and should be treated as directional.

Patent docket reputation

D. Mass. is not a "rocket docket." The 2017 Morgan Lewis analysis estimated roughly 3.6 years to trial in patent cases, versus about 2.0 years in Delaware and 2.3 in E.D. Tex. LegalMetric's district report shows an average filing-to-termination time of 16.6 months across all patent cases but 42.3 months for cases reaching trial (32.4 jury, 46.2 bench). On outcomes, older empirical work placed the district in the middle or slightly below the middle of major patent venues — a Lemley study cited by Morgan Lewis gave D. Mass. a 39.4% claimant win rate (between E.D. Tex. and D. Del. on one side and N.D. Cal. on the other), and a North Carolina Law Review regression found D. Mass. patent-holder win rates significantly below the ten-district mean. I found no current published Lex Machina, Unified Patents, or Reuters analysis designating D. Mass. as plaintiff- or defendant-friendly, so that characterization should not be asserted; notably, the court's own 2008 rulemaking notice said the patent rules were "intended to be neutral as between patentee and accused infringer." On procedure, LegalMetric reports a 50% movant win rate on contested transfer motions (only 6 decisions in its dataset) and a 55.6% win rate on motions to stay pending IPR (18 decisions) — samples far too small to generalize from. Trial practice historically skews toward juries: LegalMetric's long-run dataset records 27 patent jury trials versus 14 bench trials, and the Lemley study placed D. Mass. in the top five districts by share of patent cases actually tried (6.2%).

Local rules and procedures

The distinctive feature is Local Rule 16.6 (Patent Proceedings), adopted November 4, 2008 and rewritten effective June 1, 2018 (courtrules.net text, Practical Law deadlines chart). Unlike the E.D. Tex. or N.D. Cal. patent rules, D. Mass. folds its requirements into the civil local rules and pairs them with hard calendaring: the court must set trial no later than 24 months after the initial scheduling conference and a Markman hearing within nine months, with fact discovery cut off at 15 months (or 60 days after claim construction, whichever is later) and expert discovery at 18 months. Automatic disclosures are sequenced on 21-day intervals — patentee infringement charts, prosecution history, conception/reduction-to-practice documents and real-party-in-interest evidence 21 days after the scheduling conference; a meet-and-confer 21 days later; then accused-infringer non-infringement and invalidity charts plus technical documents, samples and source code 21 days after that. Amendments require leave of court and a timely showing of good cause. The rule supplies a default protective order, prescribes the claim construction sequence (joint statement, opening briefs with expert declarations, expert depositions within 21 days of the response deadline, responsive briefs, and live hearings limited to attorney argument absent court approval), and imposes disclosure obligations and privilege-waiver/privilege-log requirements on parties relying on advice of counsel. There is no district-wide W.D. Tex.-style standing claim construction order; individual judges supplement LR 16.6 with their own practices and standing orders.

Notable cases

The tracked case, Nike, Inc. v. New Balance Athletics, Inc., No. 1:23-cv-12666-JEK (D. Mass. filed Nov. 6, 2023), is the district's most visible current patent matter: Nike asserts nine Flyknit footwear patents against New Balance and seeks enhanced damages and a permanent injunction (complaint). The court denied New Balance's motion to dismiss claims on the '350, '511 and '758 patents on August 13, 2024, holding that the "flat knit edges" scope dispute belonged at claim construction, not the pleading stage — rejecting New Balance's reliance on the Federal Circuit's construction of related Nike claims in Nike, Inc. v. adidas AG, 812 F.3d 1326 (Fed. Cir. 2016) (Vitallaw summary). A June 6, 2025 memorandum and order addressed New Balance's motion to stay pending IPR; nine IPR petitions on six of the patents were filed by New Balance, lululemon and Skechers, and the PTAB invalidated claims of the '484 patent on March 21, 2025 (CourtListener docket). Other recent activity on the docket includes paired Dyson v. SharkNinja actions (Nos. 1:24-cv-12373, 1:24-cv-12130), SiOnyx, LLC v. Apple, Inc. (1:24-cv-12354) and HP Inc. v. Access Advance LLC (1:24-cv-12186); historically significant D. Mass. patent cases include Skyhook Wireless v. Google (1:10-cv-11571-RWZ, Judge Zobel, claim construction January 2015), EMC v. Hewlett-Packard, Exergen v. Wal-Mart, Bose v. JBL and Akamai v. Digital Island.

Judges

Patent cases are assigned by the district's random assignment plan, so no single judge controls the docket. The judge in the tracked case is Judge Julia E. Kobick (commissioned 2023), who wrote both the August 2024 dismissal ruling and the June 2025 stay order in Nike v. New Balance. Other judges with the largest patent caseloads in the LegalMetric dataset include Chief Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV, Judge Allison D. Burroughs, Judge Richard G. Stearns (now senior), Judge Patti B. Saris (senior), Judge Leo T. Sorokin, Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton (senior), Judge Indira Talwani and Judge William G. Young (senior) — the latter profiled by Morgan Lewis/Lex Machina data as among the most active district judges nationally in patent case volume from 1996 to 2015, with comparatively low median damages awards. I could not verify any published Lex Machina, Unified Patents or Reuters analysis labeling individual D. Mass. judges as plaintiff- or defendant-friendly, and none is asserted here.