USITC (Section 337)

I'll verify the ITC's structure, current ALJs, docket volume, and the tracked Maxell v. Lenovo investigation before writing.

Now let me verify the current ALJ roster, recent notable appellate rulings, and any 2025 procedural rule changes.

Court overview. The "court" here is not an Article III court but the U.S. International Trade Commission, an independent federal agency at 500 E Street SW, Washington, D.C., that adjudicates unfair-import cases under Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930, 19 U.S.C. § 1337. Patent cases are tried before one of the Commission's administrative law judges (ALJs), who issues an initial determination; the six Commissioners (or a subset) review and issue the final determination; appeals go exclusively to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit under 28 U.S.C. § 1295(a)(6), and remedial orders are subject to a 60-day period of presidential review. The ITC cannot award damages; relief is prospective — limited or general exclusion orders enforced by Customs and Border Protection, cease-and-desist orders, and civil penalties for violations. The docket is small and specialized: USITC statistics report 61 new complaints/ancillary proceedings and 108 active investigations in FY2024, with active investigations running ~105 in FY2025, of which 88% alleged solely patent infringement — roughly 45–60 new matters a year, a small fraction of national district court patent filings, and functionally comparable in volume to one busy district's patent docket (USITC Section 337 statistics; types of unfair acts).

Docket reputation. It is a genuine rocket docket, and that is the main reason parties file there. The ALJ sets a target date at institution; by rule target dates exceeding 16 months require Commission approval, the evidentiary hearing typically occurs 9–11 months after institution, and case resolution generally lands around 16–18 months from institution — a pace with no district court analogue, and one that is generally not stayed for parallel district court litigation or AIA post-grant proceedings (a point repeatedly noted in practitioner commentary, e.g. Ropes & Gray, May 2021; Cleary Gottlieb, Apr. 2025). Two structural features distinguish it from a district: there are no juries — all trials are bench hearings before an ALJ — and there is no "transfer" practice, since venue is effectively fixed by the complainant's filing; the closest analogues are the Commission's discretion whether to institute and motions to terminate. On outcomes, USITC data show 9 violations versus 10 no-violations across 19 merits determinations in FY2024 (47%), and Sterne Kessler's year-in-review notes the violation rate fell below 50% for the first time in a decade, with 7 violations among 17 final determinations in 2024 (Sterne Kessler ITC Year in Review, 2d ed.). I did not find published Lex Machina or Unified Patents analysis in these searches assessing the ITC as plaintiff- or defendant-friendly, so I won't characterize it that way.

Local rules and procedures. Practice is governed by the Commission's Rules of Practice and Procedure, 19 C.F.R. Part 210, plus each ALJ's individual Ground Rules — there is no ITC analogue to the E.D. Tex. or W.D. Tex. patent local rules or claim-construction order; scheduling and early-disposition practice come from the rules and each judge's ground rules. Two distinctive procedures matter most to patent litigants: the "100-day" early disposition program, launched as a pilot in 2013 and codified at 19 C.F.R. § 210.10(b)(3), under which the Commission may direct the ALJ to rule within 100 days of institution on a potentially dispositive issue such as domestic industry, standing, importation, or patent eligibility; and a 2021 pilot permitting interim initial determinations on discrete issues before the main hearing. Both have been used sparingly — the Commission has repeatedly declined to designate 100-day proceedings on grounds of complexity, citing the need for third-party discovery (USITC pilot program announcement; Ropes & Gray, May 2021). The Office of Unfair Import Investigations is also a party in many investigations, adding a staff litigant. Summary determinations are comparatively rare given the compressed schedule, and claim construction is decided by the ALJ but reviewed de novo on appeal, with underlying factual findings reviewed for clear error (as the Federal Circuit restated in Lashify).

Notable cases and rulings. The single tracked matter, Maxell, Ltd. v. Lenovo Group Ltd. et al. (complaint filed March 30, 2022; instituted as Inv. No. 337-TA-1312), is a textbook illustration of how ITC cases actually end. Maxell asserted six patents (Nos. 7,199,821; 7,324,487; 8,170,394; 8,982,086; 10,129,590; 10,244,284) against Lenovo and Motorola Mobility; the ALJ denied Maxell's bid to rely on Lenovo US's domestic activities to satisfy the domestic-industry requirement; Maxell then withdrew its complaint contingent on the Commission instituting a companion investigation (337-TA-1324), and the Commission terminated 337-TA-1312 in its entirety on withdrawal in September 2022 (87 FR 58135). The companion investigation was itself partially terminated patent-by-patent and then terminated on settlement in August 2023. On the law, the biggest recent development is Lashify, Inc. v. ITC (Fed. Cir. Mar. 5, 2025), which expressly overruled Schaper and held that U.S. sales, marketing, warehousing, quality control, and distribution expenditures can satisfy the economic prong of the domestic-industry requirement — a holding the ITC asked the Federal Circuit to revisit by a combined panel rehearing/en banc petition filed May 21, 2025, and one that has since generated a pending Supreme Court petition (No. 26-316, filed Sept. 3, 2026) in a separate Apple/Masimo dispute over the same economic-prong analysis. Related litigation over ALJ appointments (consolidated ratification notice at 90 FR 54367) remains an active structural issue.

Judges. The Commission's Office of Administrative Law Judges currently lists six judges: Chief ALJ Clark S. Cheney (Chief since February 2022) and ALJs MaryJoan McNamara (appointed 2015), Cameron Elliot (2019), Monica Bhattacharyya (2021), Bryan F. Moore (2022), and Doris Johnson Hines (2023) (USITC ALJ page). The Chief ALJ assigns each investigation, and individual ALJs publish their own Ground Rules. Note that the public Federal Register notices for the tracked Maxell investigations do not name the presiding ALJ in the materials available to me, so I can't tie a specific judge to that docket; I also would not characterize any ITC ALJ as plaintiff- or defendant-leaning, since no Lex Machina, Unified Patents, or Reuters analysis of that kind surfaced in my search.