U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division

Court Profile: U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas (Dallas Division)

Court overview. The United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas (NDTX), Dallas Division, sits in the Fifth Circuit and is one of seven divisions in a district spanning 100 north-Texas counties. Its patent docket is modest but growing: Lex Machina's 2026 Patent Litigation Report put NDTX filings at roughly 65 in 2023 and 125 in 2025 — nearly a doubling over two years — still far behind the Eastern District of Texas (which re-took the national lead with 1,000+ filings in 2024) and other top venues like the Northern District of Illinois. The site tracks only two NDTX cases, both filed in Dallas.

Patent docket reputation. NDTX is not generally labeled a "rocket docket" and does not appear in the top tier of national patent venues, but it has drawn increased assertion activity as Texas-based plaintiffs and NPEs continue to favor in-state forums. It is a commercial-litigation market with real jury trial capacity: the most prominent recent example is VidStream LLC v. Twitter/X Corp. (not among the tracked cases), which produced a $105 million jury verdict in Dallas in 2025, later reduced to a final judgment of roughly $172.8 million in November 2025. I found no published Lex Machina or Unified Patents statistics on NDTX transfer-grant rates or plaintiff win rates, so any characterization beyond "active and growing" would be unsourced. Early-disposition NPE cases do move quickly — e.g., a 2025 NDTX case against Neiman Marcus closed via voluntary dismissal in about 152 days before any answer was filed.

Local rules and procedures. The defining procedural feature is Miscellaneous Order No. 62, the Dallas Division's specialized patent rules — a departure from the rest of the district, which does not follow patent-specific local rules. Order 62 governs the case-management conference, infringement and invalidity contentions, amendment of contentions, opinions of counsel, protective orders, and a structured claim-construction (Markman) track, with the court's expectation of strict compliance and risk of sanctions. The Feit Electric docket reflects this regime directly: the parties' infringement contentions were served in the format prescribed by Misc. Order 62 ¶¶ 3-1 through 3-7, and the court held a Markman hearing in May 2025. Practical Law separately tracks Order 62 as the controlling framework for Dallas-division patent cases.

Notable cases. The two tracked cases bracket the docket's range:

• Feit Electric Company, Inc. v. Elong International USA, Inc. et al. (3:24-cv-01089, filed May 2024) — LED-filament patent infringement over U.S. Patent No. 8,604,678. Judge Brantley Starr issued a substantive claim-construction opinion rejecting the defendants' indefiniteness challenges on terms such as "improves an off-state white appearance," and the case ended in a joint dismissal without prejudice (January 2026).
• Lemko Corporation v. Microsoft Corporation et al. (3:22-cv-00363-L, filed Feb. 2022) — assertion of eight mobile-core/NFV patents against Microsoft and Affirmed Networks. Judge Sam A. Lindsay granted Microsoft's motion to dismiss in part (contributory infringement, dismissed with prejudice) and denied it in part (June 2025), allowing direct and induced-infringement claims to proceed; the case is now closed.

Judges. Both tracked cases map to reliable judge assignments. Judge Sam A. Lindsay (Dallas) presided over Lemko v. Microsoft, signing the June 2025 dismissal order. Judge Brantley Starr, the district's Chief Judge, presided over Feit Electric v. Elong and also handled the 2025 NPE case Pointwise Ventures v. Neiman Marcus. Other Dallas Division judges — such as Judge David C. Godbey, whose published standing orders (including protective-order practice) are catalogued on the court's local-rules platform — handle patent-relevant dockets, but no judge beyond Lindsay and Starr appears in the tracked cases, and I found no published Lex Machina/Unified Patents analysis characterizing any NDTX judge as systematically plaintiff- or defendant-friendly.