W.D. Tex. (Judge Albright / Mag. Gilliland)

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Court overview

The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas (W.D. Tex.) sits in the Fifth Circuit, with divisional courthouses in San Antonio, Austin, El Paso, Midland-Odessa, Del Rio, Pecos, and Waco. It became a national patent venue almost entirely on the strength of one judge's docket: after Judge Alan D. Albright took the Waco bench in September 2018, filings in the district rose from roughly 85 cases in 2017 to about 989 in 2021, at which point nearly one in four U.S. patent suits was filed in his single-judge division (Bloomberg Law; RPX; Lex Machina's 2024 Patent Litigation Report addendum). That concentration ended with then-Chief Judge Orlando Garcia's July 25, 2022 order requiring random assignment of Waco patent cases among the district's twelve district judges, reaffirmed by Chief Judge Alia Moses in December 2022 and tightened again in May 2024. The district is now third nationally for overall patent litigation and second for NPE filings, behind the Eastern District of Texas and the District of Delaware — about 10–12% of new filings in 2025–2026 (RPX data bytes; Daily Journal, May 2026; Bloomberg Law analysis puts W.D. Tex. at over 500 patent suits in 2025 versus more than 1,200 in E.D. Tex.).

Patent docket reputation

W.D. Tex. is a fast docket, though not the fastest: The Sedona Conference's comparative work puts average time to trial at roughly 26 months in E.D. Tex. and 29 months in W.D. Tex. Lex Machina reported that for cases terminated 2019–2023, Judge Albright's cases reached a claim construction hearing in a median of 315 days and summary judgment/trial in medians above 700 days each, and terminated overall in a median of 200 days — faster termination than E.D. Tex., largely because of a higher share of high-volume NPE filings that settle. On § 1404(a) transfer, Albright's court was the Federal Circuit's most frequent mandamus target: he denied 29 of 37 transfer motions as of mid-2021 (Gugliuzza, Federal Judge Seeks Patent Cases), and the Federal Circuit repeatedly reversed, including a precedential 2020 order requiring transfer of an Apple case to the Northern District of California and roughly ten mandamus grants in October–November 2021 alone (Law360). He also rarely stayed cases pending PTAB review, describing his rationale as trying cases as quickly as the PTAB can resolve them. Claim construction is judge-decided, and trials were overwhelmingly jury trials; Albright told Law360 in 2023 that Waco juries had not proven to be "runaway plaintiffs juries."

Local rules and procedures

W.D. Tex. has no district-wide patent local rules comparable to the Eastern District of Texas' Patent Rules; patent practice has been governed instead by judge-specific standing orders. Judge Albright's Standing Order Governing Proceedings (OGP), revised repeatedly (OGP 4.0 in March 2022, later versions in the Austin division), set the default case schedule and is the template other W.D. Tex. judges adopted — notably Judge David Counts of Midland-Odessa, who adopted a substantially Albright-based standing order one week after the July 2022 assignment order. Distinctive features include: fact discovery stayed until after the Markman hearing (with venue, jurisdictional, and claim construction discovery excepted); fixed discovery limits (30 interrogatories, 45 requests for admission, 75 requests for production, 70 hours of fact depositions per side, 7 hours of expert deposition per report); a presumption against general email/ESI production absent good cause; venue and jurisdictional discovery capped at ten weeks from the filing of an initial venue motion; discovery disputes handled by a word-limited email exchange (500 words per issue, 1,000 for multiple issues) with a three-business-day response; briefing page limits keyed to patent count; and a standing referral of patent discovery disputes to magistrate judges under Local Rule Appendix C. Markman practice is unusual: the court issues preliminary constructions in advance of the hearing, the party opposing the court's construction argues first, and a technology adviser is appointed in some (not all) cases.

Notable tracked cases and rulings

The three tracked cases are CommWorks Solutions, LLC v. Hitron Technologies Inc., v. Ubee Interactive Holding Corp. (d/b/a Ubee Interactive Corp.), and v. ZyXEL Communications Corporation, all filed February 1, 2023 in the Waco Division. CommWorks is an NPE asserting acquired former 3Com networking patents on Wi-Fi/WMM, 802.11, and broadband-provisioning technology (Stanford NPE Litigation Database lists it as an "acquired patents" asserter; RPX records the Hitron case at 155 days in litigation). Two ended in voluntary dismissal and the ZyXEL case in dismissal with prejudice — a resolution pattern consistent with Lex Machina's finding that the bulk of W.D. Tex. patent cases terminate by likely settlement. The tracked entries do not specify the assigned judge; because they were filed after the 2022 random-assignment order, assignment was not guaranteed to any particular judge. The district's highest-profile public rulings remain the Albright-era VLSI v. Intel verdicts ($2.18 billion and $948 million) and, more recently, the January 13, 2025 oral grant of an anti-suit injunction in Onesta IP v. BMW barring a parallel German action brought in the wake of the CJEU's BSH Hausgeräte v. Electrolux decision — which the Federal Circuit then temporarily stayed. Albright's final patent trial reportedly ended in a no-infringement finding in August 2026 (Law360).

Judges

Patent work concentrates in a handful of hands. Judge Alan D. Albright (Waco 2018; transferred to Austin in 2025) was the district's patent engine and retired from the bench at the end of August 2026 to return to private practice; he remained the district's largest patent backlog holder at departure. Magistrate Judge Derek Gilliland — a former patent litigator sworn in April 2021 as Waco's second magistrate, and the second judge named in this tracker — handled Markman hearings, discovery, transfer and dismissal motions, pretrial matters, and voir dire, and can preside over patent jury trials by consent; he remains the continuity figure in Waco. Judge David Counts (Midland-Odessa), also a former patent litigator, rose to second in the nation in NPE filings (about 6% of national patent cases in Q1 2025) after adopting Albright-style standing orders in a division with no special assignment restrictions; RPX noted as of early 2025 that he had not yet granted any contested § 1404(a) transfer or IPR stay motion, so his posture on those issues is less established. Judge Robert L. Pitman (Austin) carried that division's patent docket before Albright's arrival, and Judge Christopher Robert Wolfe, commissioned to the Waco seat on April 23, 2026, received roughly 30 reassigned patent cases and had not issued patent standing orders as of June 2026 (Sidley/Law360). Chief Judge Alia Moses is the current chief judge and author of the assignment orders governing Waco.