W.D.N.Y.

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

Let me verify judges, local patent rules specifics, and the tracked cases.

Let me verify the Patent Pilot Program participation, current judges, and the local patent rules.

W.D.N.Y. — Patent Litigation Profile

Court overview. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York sits in the Second Circuit, with courthouses in Buffalo and Rochester. The court's website lists eight authorized district judgeships. Its patent docket is small — in a league with second-tier districts rather than the national leaders (D. Del., E.D. Tex., W.D. Tex., N.D. Cal., C.D. Cal.). For scale, a 2014 JD Supra review of New York IP filings counted 33 IP cases in the Western District that year, versus 637 in S.D.N.Y., and reported the district averaged roughly 33 new IP cases annually. That is dated, and no current-year patent figure was verified for this profile; the site's own tracker holds only seven W.D.N.Y. cases, consistent with a low-volume venue. Filings here are driven predominantly by defendant residence: Kodak, Xerox, Bausch & Lomb and Kodak Alaris all have long-standing Rochester-area ties.

Patent docket reputation. W.D.N.Y. is not a "rocket docket," and there is no published Lex Machina/Unified Patents analysis identifying it as plaintiff-friendly. The opposite signal exists: Lex Machina's 2013 Patent Litigation Year in Review listed W.D.N.Y. as the slowest district for median time to trial (2,423 days) — though Lex Machina's own commentary and contemporaneous coverage cautioned that figure reflected a single trial that year and is therefore not statistically meaningful. A decade later, in AudioEye, Inc. v. accessiBe Ltd., Judge Albright (W.D. Tex.) credited plaintiff's statistics that average time to trial in W.D.N.Y. was "more than four years" when weighing § 1404(a) transfer, and transferred the case into W.D.N.Y. on reconsideration (March 2022). Transfer practice follows ordinary Second Circuit § 1404(a) factors; Bausch & Lomb, Inc. v. Zea Vision LLC, No. 20-cv-06452 (W.D.N.Y. Aug. 31, 2022), transferred an infringement case to E.D. Mo. after the plaintiff conceded venue was improper. Verified jury-versus-bench trial data for this district is too thin to characterize, and no reliable current statistics were located.

Local rules and procedures. Unlike many small districts, W.D.N.Y. has a full set of Local Patent Rules, effective January 1, 2014 and most recently updated effective January 1, 2024 (per the court's website and a Jan. 3, 2024 court notice). The rules were drafted by a committee impaneled by Magistrate Judge Jeremiah J. McCarthy with local patent practitioners. They require: initial infringement contentions within 14 days after the case management conference; initial non-infringement and invalidity contentions within 60 days; final infringement/invalidity contentions 21 weeks after the initial contentions; and final non-infringement contentions/responses 28 days after that. Claim construction briefing is staggered — patentee's opening brief 60 days after the Joint Claim Construction Statement, responsive brief 30 days, reply 15 days, surreply 15 days — with a master timeline at Appendix A. Appendix B is a Model Order Regarding E-Discovery in Patent Cases, which phases email production after contentions and presumptively caps it at five search terms and five custodians. N.D.N.Y.'s rules are similar; S.D.N.Y. and E.D.N.Y. have less extensive patent rules. I did not verify W.D.N.Y.'s participation in the now-concluded Patent Pilot Program, so no claim is made about specialized case assignment.

Notable tracked cases. The docket is dominated by RAH Color Technologies LLC (Dr. Richard A. Holub's color-management portfolio), which sued Rochester-resident defendants including Eastman Kodak Co. (No. 6:19-cv-06112, filed Feb. 8, 2019, five patents) and Xerox (No. 6:18-cv-06746); several RAH cases were swept into MDL 2874 in N.D. Cal. before Judge Illston, and PTAB inter partes reviews (e.g., Adobe's challenges) invalidated claims such as 32, 33 and 37 of the '897 patent. The tracker also shows Flexiworld Technologies, Inc. v. Xerox Corp. (dismissed) and Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. v. Kodak Alaris Inc. (closed) — both typical of high-volume licensing plaintiffs routing claims against locally based imaging companies rather than a district attracting out-of-state filers.

Judges. The court's site and the FJC history list, among its district judges, Chief Judge Elizabeth A. Wolford (2013–present), Charles J. Siragusa (1997–present) and Frank P. Paul Geraci, Jr. (2013–present); Judge Geraci presided over the Bausch & Lomb v. Zea Vision transfer ruling (docket suffix "FPG"). Magistrate Judge Jeremiah J. McCarthy is documented as the driving force behind the district's Local Patent Rules. I could not verify a formal roster of "patent-designated" judges or current senior-status details, and no published Lex Machina/Unified Patents analysis characterizes any W.D.N.Y. judge as plaintiff- or defendant-leaning — so none is asserted here.

Caveats: district-level patent statistics for a docket this small are volatile year to year; the trial-timing figures above are drawn from a 2013 report, a 2014 docket survey, and a 2022 transfer opinion, not from current Lex Machina or AOUSC data.