S.D.N.Y. (Judge Paul A. Engelmayer)

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

S.D.N.Y. — Patent Litigation Profile (Judge Paul A. Engelmayer)

Court overview. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York sits in Manhattan (Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse, 500 Pearl St.; Thurgood Marshall U.S. Courthouse, 40 Centre St.) and sits in the Second Circuit; patent appeals go to the Federal Circuit. S.D.N.Y. is one of the largest federal districts by overall civil volume, but its patent docket is a small slice of that. Lex Machina's 2020 report put S.D.N.Y. at 114 new patent cases (4.07% of filings) in 2010 — seventh nationally, behind E.D. Tex., D. Del., C.D. Cal., N.D. Cal., N.D. Ill. and D.N.J. More recent Docket Navigator/LexisNexis summaries of 2023–24 filings do not list S.D.N.Y. among the top five patent venues (E.D. Tex., D. Del., W.D. Tex., C.D. Cal., N.D. Cal.). Practically, S.D.N.Y. is a mid-tier patent venue: consistently top-10 in raw filings, but with a share far below the Texas districts and Delaware. Its patent docket has historically been disproportionate in ANDA/Hatch-Waxman work — Lex Machina ranked S.D.N.Y. a "distant second" to D. Del. in new ANDA cases (158 filings, 2009–2015) — and in suits against New York–based technology defendants.

Patent docket reputation. S.D.N.Y. is not a rocket docket in the E.D. Tex. sense; it is generally treated as a neutral-to-defense-leaning venue for patent plaintiffs, and I found no well-sourced Lex Machina, Unified Patents or Reuters analysis in this search characterizing it as plaintiff-friendly for patent cases. It does have genuine patent trial experience: Lex Machina's 2013 Year in Review reported that over half of all U.S. patent trials that year occurred in D. Del. (25), E.D. Tex. (25) or S.D.N.Y. (17), with S.D.N.Y.'s trials split 11 bench / 7 jury / 1 mixed. That figure is dated and should be treated as historical color, not current. On speed, CourtListener's court comparator (all case types, 2009–2024) shows S.D.N.Y. median time to a claim construction hearing of 465 days (N.D. Cal.: 421) and median time to trial of 906 days (N.D. Cal.: 778) — again all-practice-area data, not patent-specific, and no patent-only time-to-trial figure for S.D.N.Y. was verified here. On § 1404(a) transfers, I found no reliable published aggregate grant rate for S.D.N.Y. patent cases; transfer motions are routine and governed by Second Circuit law, but a numeric rate is not supportable from these sources. Claim construction is done by the district judge on Markman briefing and hearing; for example, in Amron v. MLB Advanced Media (No. 24-cv-2930 (PAE)), briefing ran from May–June 2026 to a July 23, 2026 Markman hearing, roughly a year after the case management order — indicative of a deliberate, not accelerated, schedule.

Local rules and procedures. S.D.N.Y. has its own Local Patent Rules, effective April 8, 2013, adopted jointly with E.D.N.Y. They are deliberately short (~3 pages) and far less prescriptive than the E.D. Tex., N.D. Cal. or N.D. Ill. regimes. Core requirements: infringement contentions within 45 days of the scheduling conference; invalidity contentions within 45 days of infringement contentions; a Joint Disputed Claim Terms Chart (LPR 11); and claim construction briefing under LPR 12 — opening brief 30 days after the chart, response 30 days later, reply within 7 days. LPR 10 covers production of opinions of counsel supporting willfulness/exceptional-case defenses. Judges typically fold these into a Patent Case Management Plan and Scheduling Order (the district's model, e.g., Judge Vyskocil's Sept. 2020 form, sets a post-discovery case management conference, claim construction chart and claim construction hearing). Judge Engelmayer's individual rules add distinctive features: letters to Chambers via ECF capped at three pages; pre-motion conferences required only for discovery and summary judgment (requested within 14 days of the close of fact discovery), not for motions to dismiss; 25-page opening/opposition and 10-page reply limits (with LCR 7.1 word limits); a standing instruction that parties not submit courtesy copies unless ordered; express AI/LLM verification obligations on lead counsel; and detailed sealing/redaction rules.

Notable cases and rulings. The single tracked case, Web 2.0 Technologies, LLC v. Nulab, Inc., No. 1:23-cv-02589 (PAE) (filed Mar. 27, 2023), asserted patents on online document collaboration and personal-information repositories; after a motion-to-dismiss round and extensions, the parties settled and Judge Engelmayer dismissed the action without prejudice on Aug. 2, 2023 (declining, per his individual rules, to retain settlement-enforcement jurisdiction absent a public settlement agreement). A near-identical earlier case (No. 23-cv-339) was voluntarily dismissed — an outcome pattern (early settlement/voluntary dismissal) typical of NPE suits in this district. Judge Engelmayer's patent decisions include Loftex USA LLC v. Trident Ltd., No. 11 Civ. 9349 (PAE) (S.D.N.Y. May 15, 2013) (construing "comprising," "2-ply yarn," "about"; finding "ramification" indefinite), Focus Products Group Int'l, LLC v. Kartri Sales Co., No. 15 Civ. 10154 (PAE) (June 5, 2023) (dismissing infringement claim and invalidity counterclaim without prejudice as moot after USPTO cancellation of the asserted design patent), and a BlenderBottle claim-construction ruling in Trove Brands, LLC v. Runway Blue, LLC rejecting indefiniteness. He also held that Twombly/Iqbal plausibility applies to patent invalidity counterclaims alongside the Local Patent Rules — a position later followed by Judge Denise Cote. Other recent S.D.N.Y. patent activity reported by practitioners (per Lewis Popovski's case summaries) includes § 101 dismissal of a Linfo IP suit (Judge Furman, Jan. 2025), summary judgment of non-infringement for Samsung (Judge Oetken, Mar. 2025), sanctions against a patentee for a late-switched damages theory in Geigtech East Bay v. Lutron (Judge McMahon, Nov. 2024), and fee/sanctions awards against EscapeX IP in favor of Google (Magistrate Judge Figueroa).

Judges. I could not verify a current published ranking of S.D.N.Y. judges by patent case volume; Lex Machina's most-active patent judge tables are dominated by E.D. Tex. and D. Del. judges, so no S.D.N.Y. judge should be described as a national patent-volume leader on this record. Within the district, judges who recur in published patent rulings include Paul A. Engelmayer (the tracked case; the claim-construction, design-patent-mootness and BlenderBottle rulings above), Denise Cote, Jesse M. Furman, and Lorna G. Schofield; historically, Lex Machina's 2013 merits-decision table listed Sidney H. Stein among the most active judges nationally for patent merits decisions. This list is illustrative of docket activity, not a comment on any judge's leanings.

Sourcing note: statistics above come from Lex Machina reports (2013, 2015, 2020, 2025), CourtListener's court comparator, the S.D.N.Y. Local Patent Rules and Judge Engelmayer's Individual Rules, and law-firm case summaries (Kenyon/JD Supra, Abel & Bach). Where a figure is dated, non-patent-specific, or unavailable (SDNY-specific patent time-to-trial and § 1404(a) transfer rates), that is flagged rather than estimated.