W.D. Tex. (Austin Div.)

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W.D. Tex. (Austin Division) — Patent Litigation Profile

Court overview. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas sits in the Fifth Circuit and is headquartered in San Antonio, with divisions in Austin, Waco, El Paso, Midland-Odessa, Del Rio, Pecos and San Antonio. Austin is one of the district's smaller patent dockets but has grown in prominence as the district's patent volume redistributed after 2022. Note on scope: this site currently tracks only one case at this court (CyboEnergy, Inc. v. Yotta Energy, Inc., No. 1:25-cv-01300, Austin Div., filed Aug. 13, 2025, pending), so the docket-size figures below come from published district-wide reporting rather than from this site's sample. WDTX as a whole peaked at roughly 23–25% of national patent filings in 2022 (RPX; Keker Van Nest CLE materials), was the third-ranked district for new patent filings in 2025 at about 12% of filings, and was the second-most popular venue for NPE suits that year (RPX, as reported by the Daily Journal).

Docket reputation. WDTX earned its reputation as a fast patent venue largely through Judge Alan Albright's Waco docket, which offered plaintiffs early trial settings and a restrictive posture on § 1404(a) transfer. Empirical work (Helmers, Ganglmair & Love, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 2026) found that cases assigned to Albright reached earlier trial dates and generated fewer motions to stay pending PTAB proceedings and fewer § 101 challenges than randomly assigned cases. Lex Machina's 2024 Albright-vs.-Gilstrap addendum reported median times of ~315 days from filing to claim construction hearing and 700+ days to summary judgment and trial for Albright cases terminated 2019–2023, with a median 200 days to termination overall — the latter driven partly by a high volume of cases filed by high-volume plaintiffs that settle early. The Sedona Conference places WDTX's average time to trial at roughly 29 months, versus ~26 for E.D. Tex. The July 2022 random-assignment order (then-Chief Judge Orlando Garcia, reaffirmed and tightened by Chief Judge Alia Moses in May 2025) broke the one-judge-per-division dynamic; the cited study found Albright thereafter received about 11% of wholly new Waco case assignments. Transfer, claim-construction and trial practice now vary materially by judge rather than by district.

Local rules and procedures. WDTX has no district-wide patent local rules comparable to E.D. Tex.'s. Instead, patent procedure is governed by judge-specific standing orders. Judge Albright's Standing Order Governing Proceedings (OGP) – Patent Cases (most cited version 4.4, Jan. 23, 2024, with an Austin-version variant posted on the district's site) is the most influential template, and Judge David Counts (Midland-Odessa) adopted a substantially similar order. Its distinctive features include: a stay of all non-venue, non-jurisdictional, non-claim-construction discovery until after the Markman hearing; post-Markman limits of 30 interrogatories, 45 requests for admission, 75 requests for production, 70 hours of fact depositions and 7 hours of expert depositions per report; presumptive venue-discovery limits (5 interrogatories, 10 RFPs, 10 hours of testimony, 20-day responses); a mandatory meet-and-confer-then-email-the-law-clerk escalation path for discovery disputes with 500/1,000-word caps; Markman page limits that scale with the number of asserted patents; no general email/ESI production absent good cause; and a stated policy that trial dates will not move "except in extreme situations." Albright's claim-construction practice includes issuing preliminary constructions before the Markman hearing (with the party opposing the court's construction going first) and, in some cases, appointing a technical adviser. Whether successor judges carry these practices forward is an open question.

Notable cases. The tracked case, CyboEnergy v. Yotta Energy, asserts U.S. Patent Nos. 9,331,488 and 9,331,489 (smart/scalable power inverters and low-sunlight mini-inverter power production) against a solar-storage company. It was filed by Ramey LLP, a high-volume plaintiff firm, and Unified Patents has characterized CyboEnergy as an NPE and opened PATROLL prior-art contests on the '488 patent, noting prior assertions against Northern Electric Power Technology, Home Depot, Duracell and Deye ESS Technology. Other publicly notable Austin Division patent matters include Netlist, Inc. v. Micron Technology, Inc. (No. 1:22-cv-00134-LY, before Judge Lee Yeakel), General Video, LLC v. Dell Inc. (No. 1:24-cv-01530, with extensive OGP-schedule litigation), and Vervain, LLC v. Phison Electronics Corp. (No. 1:24-cv-00259-ADA). On the appellate side, the Federal Circuit's September 2025 decision in Future Link Systems, LLC v. Realtek Semiconductor Corp. addressed a fee award stemming from one of Judge Albright's cases, holding that a defendant whose dismissal was converted to one with prejudice was a prevailing party under § 285.

Judges. The tracked case is assigned to Judge Robert L. Pitman (Austin), who has handled Austin's patent docket alongside senior judges; his docket entries in CyboEnergy are ordinary case-management extensions, with no substantive patent rulings yet. Judge Alan D. Albright — for years the nation's busiest patent judge — confirmed in January 2025 that he would move from Waco to the Austin Division (RPX). Press and practitioner reporting in 2026 indicates he has been transitioning off the patent docket, reassigning Waco patent cases to a newly appointed Judge Wolfe and expected to leave the bench (Law360/Sidley; Daily Journal), so his Austin footprint should be verified against current dockets. Also relevant in Austin is Judge David A. Ezra (senior status), and for broader WDTX context Judge David Counts (Midland-Odessa), whose adoption of an Albright-style OGP and unshared division made him the district's second busiest patent judge in recent quarters (RPX). Two new WDTX district judges confirmed in 2026 have been reported to carry lighter patent caseloads than Albright's, but their individual patent practices are not yet well documented.

Sourcing note: figures above are drawn from RPX data bytes, the Lex Machina 2024 Patent Litigation Report Addendum, the Helmers/Ganglmair/Love study in JELS, Sedona Conference working-group materials, the WDTX court website's standing-order page, Unified Patents, and Law360/Daily Journal reporting. Where a figure could not be verified from a primary or named source, it has been flagged; no independent confirmation of the exact effective date of Judge Albright's departure was available at the time of writing.