W.D. Tex. (Judge Fred Biery)

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Let me verify additional details on the district, Judge Biery, and venue statistics.

Western District of Texas (Judge Fred Biery) — Patent Litigation Profile

Court overview. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas sits in the Fifth Circuit and covers a large, multi-division territory — Austin, Waco, San Antonio, El Paso, Del Rio, Alpine, Midland-Odessa and Pecos. It is the second-busiest patent venue in the country. Lex Machina's 2026 Patent Litigation Report puts W.D. Tex. at 531 patent cases in 2025, behind only the Eastern District of Texas (1,245) and roughly equal to Delaware; Unified Patents' 2025 review put W.D. Tex. at about 11.5% of national patent filings. Filings statewide reached a ten-year high in 2025, and Lex Machina reports Texas district courts handled over 38–40% of all U.S. patent suits from 2023–2025. That volume sits on a district that is also one of the heaviest general civil and criminal dockets in the country.

Patent docket reputation. The district's patent reputation is real but is unevenly distributed across its judges, and it is not primarily a Judge Biery story. The "fast, plaintiff-oriented West Texas" narrative was built almost entirely on Judge Alan D. Albright's Waco docket (peaking at 937 patent cases in 2021), then partly displaced to Judge David Counts in Midland-Odessa after the July 2022 divisional assignment order and its May 2024 update. By comparison, Law360/Norton Rose's analysis of Docket Navigator data shows Judge Biery had zero patent cases in 2021, then 19 in 2022, 25 in 2023 and about 9 through late July 2024 — i.e., his patent docket is a direct artifact of the Waco randomization order, not of plaintiff venue-shopping aimed at him. Time-to-trial figures for the district vary widely by source and period: a 2025 PTAB filing citing district statistics gave 33.1 months; a Sedona Conference survey put it near 29 months; a Lex Machina panel for Dec. 2024–Dec. 2025 showed a 43-month median. Treat any single number as period-specific. On trials, LegalMetric's W.D. Tex. report (Jan. 2000–July 2025) records 43 patent trials — 42 jury, 1 bench — so patent cases here overwhelmingly reach juries if they are tried at all. Contested transfer practice has been intensely litigated in the district, chiefly around Judge Albright, and produced repeated Federal Circuit mandamus friction; RPX noted as of Q1 2025 that Judge Counts had not yet granted a contested transfer or a contested IPR stay. There is no comparable published body of transfer or stay rulings for Judge Biery.

Local rules and procedures. W.D. Tex. has no district-wide local patent rules. Instead, patent procedure is set by individual judges' standing orders — the best known being Judge Albright's Standing Order Governing Proceedings (OGP, updated periodically, most recently version 4.x), which imposes a Rule 16 case management conference, preliminary infringement contentions seven days before the CMC, preliminary invalidity contentions (including § 101 and § 112 contentions) seven weeks after, a discovery stay until the Markman hearing, capped post-Markman discovery (30 interrogatories, 45 RFAs, 75 RFPs, 70 fact-deposition hours per side, 7 hours per expert report), a presumption against general email/ESI production, a presumed limit on the number of claim terms to be construed, and a 15/15/5-page transfer-motion briefing schedule with venue-discovery limits. Judge Counts adopted a substantially similar order in August 2022, and Magistrate Judge Derek Gilliland in Waco operates under the Albright OGP. Other judges, including Judge Kathleen Cardone, adopted materially different orders. Judge Biery's publicly docketed procedural order is a general "Standing Order in Civil Cases Assigned to Judge Fred Biery," not a patent-specific OGP — so parties before him should not assume the Waco/Albright contentions-and-Markman architecture applies without confirming his current order and any referral to a magistrate judge (e.g., Magistrate Judge Richard B. Farrer or Judge Bemporad, depending on division).

Notable cases and rulings. The site's single tracked matter is CommWorks Solutions, LLC v. Extreme Networks, Inc., No. 6:23-cv-00835 (W.D. Tex., Waco Division, before Judge Biery), asserting four networking patents (including US 7,027,465 and reissue US RE44,904). It ended in May 2024 by joint motion, with the court dismissing the plaintiff's claims with prejudice, each side bearing its own fees and costs — no claim construction, validity or infringement ruling issued. That pattern (early, quiet, with-prejudice resolution before Markman) is typical of the low-value NPE suits that dominate this court's patent intake; other Biery-assigned patent matters visible on the public dockets, such as Wrist SP BioTech, LLC v. Google, LLC and LED Apogee LLC v. NXP USA, Inc., resolved by voluntary dismissal or stay on settlement within weeks. I found no publicly reported substantive patent merits ruling, claim construction opinion, or damages verdict from Judge Biery; any characterization of his patent jurisprudence would be extrapolation rather than reporting.

Judges. Prominent patent judges in the district, by docket volume, are Judge Alan D. Albright (Waco, now Austin; 158 patent cases in 2025 per Lex Machina; a former patent litigator and the principal architect of the district's patent standing order), Judge Walter David Counts III (Midland-Odessa; 337 patent cases in 2025, up from 108 in 2024, and the district's fastest-rising patent docket per RPX and Lex Machina), and Judge Robert L. Pitman (Austin, who handled the Austin patent docket largely alone before Judge Albright's transfer there). Magistrate Judge Derek Gilliland (Waco) carries a large referred patent docket under the Albright OGP. Judge Fred Biery — the judge in the tracked case — was appointed by President Clinton in 1994, served as Chief Judge from 2010 to 2015, sits in San Antonio, and is reported to have taken senior status while continuing to carry a civil docket; as noted, his patent caseload is modest and dates only from the 2022 randomization order. I did not find published Lex Machina, Unified Patents or Reuters analysis characterizing Judge Biery as plaintiff- or defendant-friendly, and I would not assert one.