N.D. Tex. (Dallas)

I'll research the Northern District of Texas's patent litigation practice before writing the profile.

Good initial data. Now let me dig into the specific case, the judges, and transfer/trial practice.

Let me research the district's transfer practice, trial speed, and notable patent rulings.

N.D. Tex. (Dallas) — Patent Litigation Profile

Note on scope: This site tracks only one case at this court, Fleet Connect Solutions LLC v. Werner Enterprises, Inc. (3:25-cv-00233-B, filed Jan. 28, 2025, open). The profile below is therefore a practice overview, not an inference drawn from a tracked-case sample.

Court overview

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas sits in the Fifth Circuit (Federal Circuit for patent appeals) and is divided into seven divisions — Dallas, Fort Worth, Amarillo, Lubbock, Abilene, San Angelo, and Wichita Falls — with the Dallas Division covering Dallas, Ellis, Hunt, Johnson, Kaufman, Navarro, and Rockwall counties and courthouses at 1100 Commerce Street. It is a mid-sized patent venue, not a hub. Lex Machina's 2026 Patent Litigation Report (as reported by Legal Newsline/The Center Square) put N.D. Tex. patent filings at 65 in 2023 rising to 125 in 2025 — roughly a doubling, attributed to spillover from the E.D. Tex. and W.D. Tex. NPE dockets, but still about an order of magnitude below E.D. Tex.'s annual patent volume. It is a general civil docket rather than a specialized patent court.

Patent docket reputation

N.D. Tex. is not a "rocket docket" and does not carry the plaintiff-friendly reputation associated with E.D. Tex. or the Albright-era Waco docket; no published Lex Machina, RPX, or Unified Patents analysis I found characterizes Dallas as a plaintiff-leaning patent forum. Because it sits in the Fifth Circuit, transfer motions are governed by the In re Volkswagen / In re TS Tech line and related Federal Circuit mandamus practice rather than Fifth Circuit patent-specific local law, and the district is frequently a transferee venue: in June 2025 Judge Gilstrap sent a consolidated-case member (Torus Ventures v. State National Bank of Big Spring) to Dallas on the parties' agreed § 1404(a) motion, and parallel litigation involving the tracked Fleet Connect patents has been litigated across C.D. Cal., D. Ariz., E.D. Tex., W.D. Tex., and D. Del. Divisional venue is policed actively — in April 2025 a Fort Worth-filed NEC complaint was sua sponte transferred to Dallas within seven days for lack of divisional connection. Claim construction is a bench proceeding under Markman; the tracked case carries a jury demand, and contestable merits questions in the district are ordinarily tried to a jury. I could not verify a reliable, current district-specific median time-to-trial for patent cases, so none is stated here.

Local rules and procedures

The distinctive feature is Miscellaneous Order No. 62, the district's local patent rules. Its Second Amended version, entered by then-Chief Judge Barbara M.G. Lynn, took effect October 1, 2019, and applies to Dallas Division patent cases — it is not district-wide. Key features: an early initial case management conference with mandatory in-person attendance by lead counsel; infringement contentions under ¶3-1 and invalidity contentions under ¶3-3, with ¶3-3(a)(5) requiring the accused infringer to identify asserted claims it contends are § 101-eligible/ineligible; a dedicated procedure in ¶3-7(a) for amending infringement contentions after source-code production; a joint claim construction and prehearing statement under ¶4-3; an expedited discovery-dispute process in ¶2-6; advance disclosure of advice-of-counsel opinions (¶3-8) with waiver as the sanction for non-compliance; and model protective order, model e-discovery order, and model order focusing patent claims and prior art. The rules contemplate strict compliance and significant sanctions. Outside Dallas, patent cases proceed without Order 62 and rely on the ordinary Federal Rules plus individual judge practices.

Notable cases and trends

The one tracked case, Fleet Connect Solutions LLC v. Werner Enterprises, Inc., is a § 271 action before Judge Jane J. Boyle over fleet-telematics patents, including U.S. Patent No. 7,742,388. Fleet Connect is a non-practicing entity affiliated with Empire IP; Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination against the '388 patent on February 4, 2025, noting it had been asserted in over 45 cases. The campaign has generated parallel declaratory-judgment litigation, including a Platform Science DJ action that references the Werner case. Other publicly visible N.D. Tex. patent activity in 2025 includes the NEC divisional transfer and a Dallas sua sponte dismissal for improper venue in a declaratory-judgment patent action. Historical notables include Escort Inc. v. Uniden America Corp., a Dallas patent case litigated over radar-detector patents, which was transferred into the Dallas Division at the parties' request for assignment to a patent panel — evidence that the district has at times used a designated patent panel (see Special Order 3-249). Whether that panel structure remains in effect is not something I could confirm from a current court source.

Judges

Reliably sourced N.D. Tex. judges with patent exposure include Judge Jane J. Boyle (Dallas), the presiding judge in the tracked Fleet Connect case, which was reassigned to her from Senior Judge A. Joe Fish under Special Order 3; Judge Karen Gren Scholer (Dallas, on the bench since 2018); Judge Brantley Starr (Dallas, since 2019); and Judge Ada Brown (Dallas, since 2019) — the latter three confirmed via the Federal Judicial Center's judges database and the court's own directory. Judge Mark Pittman (Fort Worth) authored the 2025 divisional transfer order discussed above. Per your instruction, I have not characterized any judge as plaintiff- or defendant-friendly: I found no published Lex Machina, Unified Patents, or Reuters analysis assigning such a reputation to any N.D. Tex. judge.

Sourcing caveats: filing counts come from the Lex Machina 2026 report as summarized by Legal Newsline; local patent rules details come from Practical Law's analysis of Misc. Order 62 and contemporaneous 2019 law-firm summaries; judge names come from the FJC and txnd.uscourts.gov. Undated third-party statistics (e.g., a LegalMetric district profile showing 15 claim construction and 5 transfer decisions for N.D. Tex.) are too stale to rely on and are omitted from the analysis above.