W.D. Tex. (Waco)

I'll verify the court's current patent litigation profile before drafting.

Court overview. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas sits in the Fifth Circuit and is divided by statute into seven divisions — Austin, Del Rio, El Paso, Midland–Odessa, Pecos, San Antonio and Waco (28 U.S.C. § 124(d)). Waco is a one-judge division that, between 2019 and 2022, captured roughly 20–25% of all U.S. patent filings (Anderson & Gugliuzza, Duke L.J. 71:419; Keker Van Nest CLE materials put Waco at ~23% of national filings in 2022). Since the district's 2022 random-assignment orders, volume has shifted district-wide and largely back to the Eastern District: Lex Machina's 2025 report shows WDTX filings of 878 (2022), 519 (2023) and 375 (2024) — still second nationally with 1,772 patent cases over that window. Lex Machina's 2026 report has WDTX rebounding to 531 patent cases in 2025 (of 4,547 nationally), well behind EDTX's 1,245.

Docket reputation. W.D. Tex. is generally described as a fast patent venue rather than the original "rocket docket." The Sedona Conference working-group paper puts average time to trial at about 29 months for WDTX versus 26 months for EDTX — among the fastest districts studied. The reputation for speed rests mostly on individual standing orders rather than district-wide rules: default schedules set Markman roughly 24–26 weeks after the case management conference and trial about a year later, with fact discovery stayed until after Markman. The volume that flowed to Waco was overwhelmingly NPE-driven (over 85% of WDTX patent suits pre-2022, per Duke L.J.). On transfer, defendants historically fared poorly: as of mid-2021, Judge Albright had denied 29 of 37 § 1404(a) motions, and the Federal Circuit repeatedly granted mandamus against those denials (In re Adobe, 823 F. App'x 929 (Fed. Cir. 2020); In re Apple, 979 F.3d 1332 (Fed. Cir. 2020); In re Apple, 2022 WL 1196768). The Federal Circuit also issued writs over delays in ruling on transfer motions (In re SK hynix, 835 F. App'x 600; In re TracFone Wireless, 2021 WL 865353). Contested stays pending PTAB review were routinely denied. Patent trials have been overwhelmingly jury trials; Judge Albright stated he did not think it fair to ask a jury to handle more than two or three patents at a time (quoted in an IPR petition, IPR2025-00819).

Local rules and procedures. WDTX has no district-wide patent local rules comparable to E.D. Tex.'s; practice is governed by individual judges' patent standing orders — principally the "Order Governing Proceedings (OGP) – Patent Cases," which functioned as Judge Albright's personal local patent rules (Cal. L. Rev. 112:327). Its features: preliminary infringement contentions seven days before the CMC and invalidity contentions seven weeks after; venue/jurisdictional and claim-construction discovery permitted pre-Markman, with venue discovery due within 10 weeks of an initial venue motion; post-Markman limits of 30 interrogatories, 45 RFAs, 75 RFPs, 70 hours of fact depositions and 7 hours per expert report; a capped-word email process for discovery disputes; and preliminary claim constructions issued before the Markman hearing, at which the party opposing the court's preliminary construction argues first. Case assignment is now governed by the Chief Judge's orders of July 25, 2022, December 16, 2022 and May 30, 2024, which randomly distribute Waco patent filings among district judges and require a motion with legal and factual justification to consolidate "related" cases (Unified Patents, Q2 2024 report). Judge David Counts adopted a version of the Albright standing order in Midland–Odessa.

Notable cases and rulings. The tracked Waco matter, CommWorks Solutions, LLC v. D-Link Corp., is part of a CommWorks campaign asserting a telecom/network-provisioning portfolio ('249, '285, '596, '664, '846, RE44,904) filed by an NPE whose parent is Brainbox Innovations; parallel CommWorks Waco cases include those against Comcast (6:21-cv-00366), Frontier (6:22-cv-01268), STMicroelectronics (7:25-cv-00363) and Microchip (7:26-cv-00043, assigned to Judge Counts). I could not independently verify the specific D-Link docket, so its procedural history should be treated as unconfirmed here. More prominent public landmarks include the March 2021 VLSI v. Intel Waco jury verdict of roughly $2.18 billion — then the largest patent award in U.S. history — later substantially undone on appeal, and the January 2026 anti-suit injunction Judge Albright orally granted to BMW against Onesta IP's German litigation, which the Federal Circuit temporarily barred (RPX, 2026). Bloomberg Law also documented a substantial legacy backlog: 129 WDTX civil cases pending three years or longer as of September 2025, 70% of them Albright's, plus 446 of his motions undecided.

Judges. Judge Alan D. Albright, the division's patent anchor since 2018, announced in April 2026 that he would leave the bench at the end of August 2026; his Waco patent docket and hundreds of pending motions are being absorbed by Austin judges Robert Pitman, David Ezra and Andrew Davis, with Chief Judge Alia Moses coordinating (Bloomberg Law, Apr. 27, 2026). Judge Christopher Robert Wolfe was commissioned to the Waco seat on April 23, 2026; as of June 2026 he had not issued patent-specific standing orders, leaving open whether he will adopt the Albright OGP (Sidley Austin client alert, June 26, 2026). Magistrate Judge Derek T. Gilliland, a former patent litigator of 20-plus years, remains in Waco handling discovery, transfer and pretrial matters and presiding over consent jury trials. Judge David Counts in Midland–Odessa is now the district's highest-volume patent judge, rising from 108 cases in 2024 to 337 in 2025 (Lex Machina 2026 report).