N.D. Ill. (Judge John Robert Blakey)

I'll research this court's patent practice before writing.

Let me verify docket statistics, transfer practice, and the tracked case.

Court overview

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois sits in the Seventh Circuit, with its main courthouse at 219 South Dearborn Street in Chicago and a Western Division in Rockford. It is consistently one of the busiest patent districts in the country, though its composition has shifted. Lex Machina's 2024 year-in-review reported that N.D. Ill. received the second-most patent suits of any district that year, behind only E.D. Tex., with the growth driven substantially by design-patent "Schedule A" filings (Lex Machina, Patent Litigation Year in Review coverage via Finnegan, June 2025). That ranking overstates its weight in ordinary utility-patent litigation: earlier Lex Machina data placed the district roughly fifth-to-seventh nationally by utility-patent filings (TIPLJ, Vol. 31, citing Lex Machina 2018–2020 data). This site tracks a single matter at the court, so the profile below is drawn from published reporting and primary court materials rather than from a large local sample.

Patent docket reputation

N.D. Ill. is not a rocket docket. In a 2021 IPR petition, a petitioner cited Docket Navigator data showing the district had not held a patent trial since May 2019, with only two patent trials calendared out of 154 active patent cases, both pending more than seven years (Petitioner's Reply, IPR2021-00421). That is a litigant's characterization in an advocacy filing, not a neutral study, but it is consistent with the district's general reputation as a slower, discovery-heavy venue rather than a fast trial venue. The district historically had one of the highest rates of stays pending PTAB review among major patent districts — roughly 72.7% of IPR/CBM/PGR stay motions fully or partially granted through 2016, per Docket Navigator data summarized by the Chicago IP Litigation blog; I could not verify a more current figure and that number should be treated as dated. On transfer practice, I found no reliable published grant-rate statistic for § 1404(a) motions in N.D. Ill.; that gap should be noted rather than filled with an estimate. Its plaintiff-friendliness reputation is driven almost entirely by the Schedule A design-patent docket — Lex Machina found that among 155 such cases filed in the district from 2020–2022, claimants prevailed 75% of the time on default or consent judgment and claim defendants prevailed zero percent of the time, with a median of 105 days to a permanent injunction. That is a default-judgment dynamic against often-absent foreign e-commerce defendants, not evidence of a pro-plaintiff posture in contested utility-patent cases.

Local rules and procedures

The district has its own Local Patent Rules (LPR), effective September 24, 2009, most recently reissued via General Order 18-0022, and drafted by an IPLAC committee chaired by Judge Matthew F. Kennelly. Several features are distinctive and worth flagging:

• Late claim construction. The LPRs deliberately place claim construction near the end of fact discovery, on the theory that the parties will have identified the truly outcome-determinative terms by then.
• Inverted briefing order. Unlike most districts, the accused infringer files the opening claim construction brief (LPR 4.2), with the patentee responding, on the committee's view that a patentee arguing "plain meaning" should not open.
• Hard caps. Initial infringement contentions are limited to 25 claims per patent and 50 total (LPR 2.2); initial invalidity contentions to 25 prior art references; and the parties are limited to 10 claim terms absent good cause (LPR 4.1).
• Automatic protective order (LPR Appendix B) deemed in effect at filing, plus dedicated ESI rules defaulting to five custodians and five search terms per producing party, with cost-shifting for overreach.
• No automatic reopening of fact discovery after claim construction: a party must move and explain why the ruling necessitates further discovery (LPR 1.3 and comment).
• Individual judges supplement these with their own standing orders. Judge Valderrama and Judge Ellis, for example, publish that they follow the LPRs in all patent cases. Some judges applied the district's Mandatory Initial Discovery Pilot (General Order 17-0005) standing order during the pilot period; Judge Blakey's minute orders in that era expressly warned that routine extension motions would not be granted.

Notable cases and rulings

The one matter this site tracks is Web 2.0 Technologies, LLC et al. v. 37signals LLC d/b/a Basecamp, No. 1:23-cv-00230 (N.D. Ill., filed Jan. 13, 2023, Blakey, J.), a two-patent assertion over an "Online Repository for Personal Information" and a "Method and System for Online Document Collaboration." Judge Blakey granted 37signals' Rule 12(b)(6) motion on March 25, 2024, holding the asserted claims ineligible under Alice step one as directed to the abstract idea of storing information and controlling access to it, with no inventive concept (Bloomberg Law IP Law Daily, Mar. 27, 2024; Web 2.0 Techs. v. 37signals, 2024 WL). Dismissal was initially without prejudice with leave to amend; the case was later dismissed with prejudice on stipulation, ending the plaintiffs' ability to reassert those patents against 37signals. The case is a useful illustration of the district's willingness to resolve soft § 101 patents at the pleading stage rather than through full Markman practice.

Other noteworthy N.D. Ill. patent-adjacent rulings: the 2018 jury verdict in Shuffle Tech Int'l v. Scientific Games — a $105 million antitrust verdict (trebled to $315 million, settled for $151 million) that ranked among the ten largest federal jury verdicts of 2018 — and Judge Blakey's later TCS John Huxley America v. Scientific Games opinion (N.D. Ill. Sept. 20, 2021) applying the discovery rule to Walker Process claims in the same card-shuffler dispute.

Judges

Judge John Robert Blakey, the presiding judge in the tracked case, is a significant patent presence in the district: Lex Machina data for 2020–2022 placed him among the ten N.D. Ill. judges with the most design-patent cases, with seven of his ten being Schedule A matters. He has drawn attention for sua sponte scrutiny of joinder statements in Schedule A cases, sometimes dismissing all but one defendant (Finnegan reporting, Jan. 2025). Other judges with substantial patent dockets include Matthew F. Kennelly (chaired the LPR drafting committee and is heavily cited in the annotated LPR case law), Edmond E. Chang, and Virginia M. Kendall, with Sharon Johnson Coleman named among the district's top design-patent judges. I did not find sourced Lex Machina, Unified Patents, or Reuters analysis ranking any of these judges as plaintiff- or defendant-friendly, so no such characterization is offered here.

Sourcing caveat: docket-size rankings, Schedule A win rates, and judge-level patent case counts above come from Lex Machina's published blog and year-in-review materials as reported by Finnegan; the trial-delay data comes from a litigant's IPR filing rather than a neutral study; and the transfer-motion and current IPR-stay statistics are gaps in the public record I could not verify.