United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama

I'll research the court before drafting. Starting with several parallel searches.

Good start. Now let me dig into judges, docket volumes, local rules, and notable cases.

Northern District of Alabama — Patent Litigation Profile

Court overview. The United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama (N.D. Ala.) sits in the Eleventh Circuit; patent appeals, however, go to the Federal Circuit. By the court's own December 2025 public notice, the district comprises five geographical divisions covering 31 counties and roughly three million residents, with courthouses in Birmingham (Hugo L. Black U.S. Courthouse), Huntsville, Tuscaloosa, Anniston, Decatur, and Florence (Ballotpedia enumerates seven divisions — sources differ). The court reports seven active district judges, three senior judges, and five magistrate judges as of December 31, 2025; Judge Madeline H. Haikala succeeded R. David Proctor as Chief Judge effective January 1, 2026. As a patent venue, N.D. Ala. is very small — Justia's docket index shows roughly 113 patent-category (NOS 830) cases and about 470 intellectual-property cases of all types for the district, against roughly 2,500 combined civil and criminal filings in 2024. It does not appear among the districts that dominate national patent filings (D. Del., W.D. Tex., E.D. Tex., N.D. Cal., D.N.J., S.D.N.Y.), and this site tracks exactly one case here.

Patent docket reputation. I found no published Lex Machina, Unified Patents, or RPX analysis characterizing N.D. Ala. as a "rocket docket," a plaintiff-friendly patent venue, or otherwise. It is not conventionally grouped with the plaintiff-oriented patent districts, and there is no district-specific published data on its § 1404(a) transfer grant rate or claim-construction outcomes that I could verify. The general civil docket does move comparatively quickly — AO/Ballotpedia caseload data put median civil time from filing to disposition at about nine months in 2024, below the national median — but that figure covers all civil cases, not patents. The one tracked case is instructive only as a scheduling data point: in Intellectual Ventures II v. BBVA Compass, the court set a Rule 26(f) report deadline in October 2013, a final pretrial conference in February 2015, and a jury trial for March 2015 — roughly 21 months from filing — although the case was stayed for IPR and ultimately dismissed, so it was never tried. Whether patent cases here are more often jury or bench tried cannot be assessed from the available sample.

Local rules and procedures. N.D. Ala. has no patent-specific local rules of the E.D. Tex. or W.D. Tex. type. I found no patent local rules, standing patent scheduling order, or W.D. Tex.–style claim construction order for this district. Instead, patent cases run on the district's Civil Local Rules plus the ALND Uniform Initial Order Governing All Further Proceedings, a district-wide standing order that the docket in the tracked case shows being entered by the assigned judge. That order reminds the parties of their obligations under Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(f) and Local Rule 26.1(d) and attaches appendices; a separate Local Rule 3.4 governs corporate disclosure statements. In practice, the assigned judge sets a bespoke pretrial schedule and trial date. Practitioners should expect the ordinary federal framework — no mandatory infringement/invalidity contentions, no rule-imposed limits on claim terms — with case management driven by the individual judge's initial order.

Notable cases and trends. The single tracked matter is Intellectual Ventures II LLC v. BBVA Compass Bancshares, Inc. and Compass Bank N.A., No. 2:13-cv-01106 (N.D. Ala., filed June 12, 2013, before Judge Abdul K. Kallon), an NPE suit over online-banking patents including U.S. Patents 5,745,574 and 6,826,694. Defendants (with Commerce Bancshares and First National Bank of Omaha) filed IPRs (IPR2014-00722, -00724, -00786, among others); the court stayed the case pending review, and Compass ultimately obtained dismissal with prejudice of all claims, per Jones Day's published experience note. Other names appearing in the district's docket index illustrate the venue's composition: university-originated assertions (Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama/UAB), regional technology and manufacturing companies (Adtran, McWane), and low-volume NPE filings (CTP Innovations, Joao Bock Transaction Systems, Securedpay Solutions, Locket IP). I did not verify outcomes in those cases and would not treat them as holdings.

Judges. There is no confirmed patent pilot program or designated patent judge in this district, and no published Lex Machina/Unified Patents ranking of its judges on patent metrics — so I cannot responsibly label any of them plaintiff- or defendant-friendly. Realistically relevant names: Abdul K. Kallon, who presided over the only tracked case here (he was still listed as a district judge in AO's March 2025 CJRA tables; his current status should be confirmed against the court's website). Chief Judge Madeline H. Haikala (Birmingham; on the bench since 2013) and Judge R. David Proctor (Birmingham; chief 2024–2025, and per Ballotpedia appears to have taken senior status effective January 1, 2026) handle substantial complex civil dockets. Judge Annemarie Carney Axon (Birmingham), Judge Liles C. Burke (Huntsville, the district's technology corridor), and Judge Anna M. Manasco (Birmingham) are also active, along with two judges seated in November 2025, Harold D. Mooty III and Edmund G. LaCour Jr. Assignment in this district is by division and case-by-case draw, not by patent specialization.

Sourcing notes: court composition and divisions from the N.D. Ala. public notice dated Dec. 31, 2025; case details from the Unified Patents litigation portal docket and PTAB filings for No. 2:13-cv-01106; dismissal outcome from Jones Day's published case experience; caseload figures from AO CJRA tables and Ballotpedia's compilation of AO statistics; docket volume from Justia's district index (an incomplete index, not a substitute for AO data). No verified district-level statistics exist in my sources for Markman outcomes, transfer grant rates, or bench-vs-jury patent trial rates here.