N.D. Tex. (O'Connor)

I'll research the Northern District of Texas's patent practice before drafting.

Let me verify the local rules history, judge specifics, and recent NDTX patent rulings.

U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas (N.D. Tex.)

Court overview. The Northern District of Texas sits in the Fifth Circuit (patent appeals go to the Federal Circuit), with divisions including Dallas, Fort Worth, Wichita Falls, Amarillo, Lubbock, Abilene and San Angelo; Dallas and Fort Worth carry the civil volume. It is not a top-tier patent venue: Lex Machina's 2026 Patent Litigation Report (as reported by The Center Square and the Texas Lawbook) puts N.D. Tex. ninth nationally for patent cases, with filings nearly doubling from 65 in 2023 to 125 in 2025. Texas overall accounted for roughly 40% of U.S. patent litigation in 2023–2025, but that is dominated by E.D. Tex. (first) and W.D. Tex. (second). N.D. Tex. is therefore a secondary but growing Texas patent venue, not a primary hub.

Docket reputation. N.D. Tex. is sometimes grouped with the Texas "rocket dockets," but the evidence is thinner than for E.D. Tex. or W.D. Tex. A 2026 Law360 analysis reprinted by Hunton Andrews Kurth ranked N.D. Tex. third among districts on speed at roughly 18.8 months — I could not confirm that figure is patent-specific, and the court does not publish a patent time-to-trial metric. The frequently cited "plaintiff-friendly" tag traces to Mark Lemley's 2000–2010 study, which found N.D. Tex. had the nation's highest patent-owner win rate (55.1%) among districts with 25+ patent cases; that data predates TC Heartland and is stale. Current NPE-heavy filings by repeat plaintiffs (e.g., the Ramey LLP and Isaac Rabicoff dockets) are visible in Dallas and Fort Worth, but I found no published Lex Machina, Unified Patents or Reuters analysis establishing a current plaintiff win rate or § 1404 transfer grant rate specific to this district. Notably, N.D. Tex. has not attracted the volume of Federal Circuit mandamus activity over transfer denials that W.D. Tex. has.

Local rules and procedures. The district's local patent rules are Miscellaneous Order No. 62, adopted via Second Amended Order effective October 1, 2019 under then-Chief Judge Barbara M.G. Lynn, and amended again effective June 1, 2026 (per the court's own news page). Order 62 requires an early Rule 26(f) conference and case management conference with lead counsel present, model protective/e-discovery orders, a model order focusing patent claims and prior art, infringement contentions due shortly before the initial case management conference, invalidity contentions roughly 45 days later, a staged claim construction sequence (term exchange, simultaneous proposed constructions, joint claim construction and prehearing statement, briefs and a hearing on a compressed schedule), and final contentions 30/50 days after the claim construction ruling — with amendments allowed only for "good cause." A key practical caveat: Order 62 by its terms applies to Dallas division patent cases only (Practical Law's guidance is expressly Dallas-specific), so the tracked Fort Worth case below would be governed instead by the Local Civil Rules, Local Civil Rule 83.10's local-counsel requirement, and the presiding judge's judge-specific standing orders. Motions to waive the local-counsel requirement are commonly denied in these cases (e.g., orders by Judges Scholer and Kinkeade).

Notable cases and rulings. The one case tracked here is Navog LLC v. Omnitracs, LLC, No. 4:26-cv-00254 (N.D. Tex., Fort Worth Div., filed March 6, 2026, assigned to Judge Reed O'Connor) — a Rabicoff-filed patent suit that was dismissed. A more consequential public ruling from the same chambers is SnapRays, LLC (d/b/a SnapPower) v. American Tack & Hardware Co.: after a May 2026 trial, a jury found the asserted claims valid and willfully infringed and awarded $9,423,533.52; Chief Judge O'Connor then granted a permanent injunction, more than $4.5 million in prejudgment interest, and attorneys' fees premised on the defendant's litigation conduct (including reliance on prior art the court had stricken).

Judges. Patent work in the district is diffuse rather than concentrated in a specialist assignment. Prominent names appearing on patent dockets include Chief Judge Reed O'Connor (Fort Worth/Wichita Falls — the tracked case and the SnapRays trial), Judge Karen Gren Scholer (Dallas), Judge Ed Kinkeade (Dallas), and Judge David C. Godbey (Dallas; now senior status — several 2026 patent cases were reassigned from him). I did not find a district-wide specialist patent assignment program or Patent Pilot Program designation for N.D. Tex., and I have not found published Lex Machina, Unified Patents or Reuters analysis characterizing any of these judges as plaintiff- or defendant-leaning, so none is asserted here.

Caveats: docket counts, time-to-trial and win-rate figures above come from secondary reporting of Lex Machina/Law360/Lemley data rather than primary court statistics; the sample tracked on this site (one case) is too small to support district-level inferences.