W.D. Tex., Waco/Austin Div.

W.D. Tex. (Waco/Austin) — Patent Litigation Profile

Court overview. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas sits in the Fifth Circuit and spans seven divisions from El Paso to Waco; the Waco and Austin divisions have anchored its patent practice. After Judge Alan D. Albright took the Waco bench in 2018, the district became the nation's busiest patent venue — filings grew from roughly 90 patent cases in 2018 to 857 in 2020, with Albright alone assigned 793 cases (19.5% of all U.S. patent filings that year) per Lex Machina's annual reports. A July 2022 chief-judge order redistributing new Waco-filed patent cases among all district judges cut the concentration, and E.D. Tex. later reclaimed the national lead; per Lex Machina's 2026 report, W.D. Tex. nonetheless rebounded to 531 patent cases in 2025, 158 of them before Albright. This site tracks one pending case here: Headwater Research LLC v. Google LLC.

Docket reputation. W.D. Tex. has been widely described in published commentary (IPWatchdog, LES, Docket Navigator, Law360) as a "rocket docket" and a plaintiff-friendly patent venue: aggressive trial schedules, early Markman hearings, a preference for jury trials, a reluctance to stay cases for PTAB/IPR, and, at least under Judge Albright, frequent denials of §1404(a) transfer motions. The Federal Circuit responded with an unusually high volume of mandamus writs ordering transfer (e.g., In re Samsung, In re Google, In re Juniper). Docket Navigator data cited in a 2022 Berkeley JIPL article put Albright's average time-to-trial at roughly 730 days (2019–2022); Chambers reported a 59% plaintiff win rate in Texas patent trials since 2018.

Local rules and procedures. W.D. Tex. has no district-wide local patent rules comparable to E.D. Tex.; instead, patent practice is governed by judge-specific standing orders, principally Albright's Standing Order Governing Proceedings (OGP), most recently OGP 4.4 (White & Case; Nat'l Law Review). Signature features include early claim construction, chart-form preliminary infringement and invalidity contentions (with §101 eligibility contentions), limits on venue/jurisdictional discovery (e.g., five interrogatories, ten RFPs, ten deposition hours), a status-report and briefing regime forcing transfer motions to be resolved before Markman, and a stay of non-claim-construction discovery until after the Markman hearing. The July 2022 General Order assigning new Waco patent cases across the district's judges — followed by a May 2023 Waco docket-management order — reshaped filing dynamics and made judge-specific orders harder to predict.

Notable cases. The tracked case, Headwater Research LLC v. Google LLC (No. 7:25-cv-00374, with related 7:25-cv-00367/-00378/-00380/-00518), was filed Aug. 27, 2025, asserting U.S. Patent Nos. 9,179,359 and 9,609,544 against Google Pixel/Android devices. It is assigned to Judge David Counts with Magistrate Judge Derek T. Gilliland, reflecting the post-2022 random-assignment regime; Google has moved to transfer to N.D. Cal. and filed IPRs against the asserted patents. Other notable W.D. Tex. activity includes the record $2.18 billion jury verdict against Intel in VLSI Technology v. Intel, the Federal Circuit mandamus transfer line, and Albright's final patent trial (a no-infringement verdict for GD Energy Products, August 2026) before his resignation at the end of that month.

Judges. Judge Alan D. Albright (Waco; former Bracewell IP litigator and magistrate judge) defined the court's patent era before stepping down at the end of August 2026, per Bloomberg Law/IPWatchdog reporting. Judge David Counts (Midland/Odessa; former AUSA and magistrate judge, confirmed 2018) presides over the tracked Headwater v. Google case, one of the patent matters now routed to him under the 2022 distribution order; he had handled only a handful of patent cases before that change (California Law Review study). Magistrate Judge Derek T. Gilliland handles pretrial matters in the tracked case, and Judge Jason K. Pulliam (San Antonio; confirmed 2019) is among the other district judges who have received redistributed patent cases. No published Lex Machina/Unified Patents/Reuters analysis characterizes Counts, Gilliland, or Pulliam's patent leanings; the "plaintiff-friendly" reputation in published sources is specific to Albright's courtroom.