W.D. Tex. (Waco Div.)

I'll verify this court's profile with several targeted searches.

Let me verify the procedural rules, current judges, and the tracked case.

Court overview

The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Waco Division, sits in the Fifth Circuit (patent appeals go to the Federal Circuit). It is not an ordinary district for patent purposes: after Judge Alan D. Albright took the Waco bench in 2018 as the division's only district judge — combined with permissive divisional filing rules — Waco drew roughly 20–25% of all U.S. patent filings at its peak, with Albright presiding over ~866 of the district's 906 open patent cases as of July 2022 (Winston & Strawn, Akin, Wilson Sonsini client alerts; Lex Machina data cited therein). This site tracks only 1 case at the Waco Division — CyboEnergy, Inc. v. Aptos Solar Technology, LLC (filed 2022-03-16; dismissed) — a very small sample that is not representative of the court's historical patent volume, and I could not independently verify the specifics of that single filing.

Patent docket reputation

Waco has functioned as a "rocket docket." LegalMetric's district report for W.D. Tex. (database download through July 2025, cited in PTAB petition exhibits) reports an average of ~30.6 months from filing to trial across 63 patent trials, all before Judge Albright; his jury-trial average has lengthened from ~22.7 months (2021) to ~35.4 months (2024) and ~41.5 months (2025, 4 trials). A Sedona Conference paper similarly placed the Western and Eastern Districts of Texas as the fastest patent districts, at roughly 29 and 26 months. The docket's defining feature was speed-driven forum selection rather than an unbroken plaintiff win rate: Judge Albright's courtroom produced both very large plaintiff verdicts (VLSI v. Intel) and defense wins in overlapping trials. A published empirical study (Helmers & Love, J. Law, Econ. & Org. 2025) found that the ability to select a judge "widely regarded as patentee-friendly" with certainty increased filings, especially by NPEs, adding roughly 460 cases over 33 months that would not otherwise have been filed. Transfer practice has been the court's most litigated flashpoint, addressed below.

Local rules and procedures

The district does not maintain a district-wide patent local-rules regime of the Eastern District of Texas type; practice is driven by individual judges' standing orders. Judge Albright's Order Governing Proceedings – Patent Cases (OGP) is the model: it is at version 4.4 (Jan. 23, 2024, superseding v4.3 of April 4, 2023) and includes preliminary infringement contentions seven days before the Rule 16 CMC, invalidity contentions seven weeks after, a discovery stay until after Markman (except venue, jurisdictional, and claim-construction discovery), capped discovery (30 interrogatories, 45 RFAs, 75 RFPs, 70 hours of fact depositions, 7 hours per expert report), ESI limitations, and an exemplary scheduling order in Appendix A. Version 4.4 added a standard 23-ruling order on motions in limine (Appendix C), a 14-day post-verdict deadline to submit a proposed final judgment, and limits on Daubert and MIL page counts. The court's website now lists Albright's OGP under the Austin Division, reflecting his move.

Case-assignment rules are the other procedural signature. On July 25, 2022, then-Chief Judge Orlando L. Garcia ordered that new Waco patent cases be randomly assigned among the district's 12 Article III judges (previously Albright automatically), expressly to break up the concentration; Chief Judge Alia Moses readopted it in December 2022 and issued an amended version on May 30, 2024, adding Judges Leon Schydlover and Ernest Gonzalez to the pool and ending non-random assignment of "related" cases. Note that random assignment applies only to patent cases filed in Waco; other divisions remain unaffected.

Notable cases and rulings

• VLSI Technology LLC v. Intel Corp. — A Waco jury returned a $2.18 billion verdict in March 2021 ($1.5B for the '373 patent, $675M for the '759 patent), one of the largest U.S. patent verdicts. The Federal Circuit (No. 2022-1906, Dec. 4, 2023) affirmed infringement of the '373 patent but vacated the damages award for a new trial, reversed infringement of the '759 patent, and reversed denial of Intel's motion to add a license defense. A separate W.D. Tex. verdict awarded VLSI a further ~$949 million against Intel.
• In re Google LLC, No. 2023-101 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 1, 2023) (precedential) — Granted mandamus and directed transfer of Jawbone Innovations v. Google out of W.D. Tex. to N.D. Cal., holding it was a clear abuse of discretion to give the court-congestion factor any weight where the patentee is an NPE with no product-market stake, and that "recent and ephemeral" Waco offices deserve little local-interest weight.
• Other mandamus reversals include In re Atlassian (Fed. Cir. Nov. 15, 2021) and the Sonos/Google line, reflecting an appellate critique of Albright's transfer denials; the Fifth Circuit's In re Planned Parenthood (52 F.4th 625, Oct. 31, 2022) emphasized district-court discretion, creating a documented Federal Circuit/Fifth Circuit tension over which circuit's transfer law governs.

Judges

Patent-relevant judges include Alan D. Albright (Waco; now confirmed for a move to the Austin Division, pending Senate confirmation of a Waco replacement — he endorsed Magistrate Judge Derek Gilliland), Chief Judge Alia Moses (Del Rio; author of the 2024 assignment order), and David Counts (Midland-Odessa), who adopted an Albright-style patent standing order and, per RPX, handled 68% of West Texas patent filings and the second-most new patent litigation nationally in Q2 2025. Robert Pitman (Austin) and Jason Pulliam (San Antonio) have also drawn Waco patent assignments under the random-assignment order. RPX reports Albright's national share fell to ~2% of patent cases by Q1 2025 (fourth place), down from the top spot he held for years — a decline directly attributable to the 2022 and 2024 assignment orders. Characterizations of individual judges' plaintiff- or defendant-orientation here come from published Lex Machina-, RPX-, and peer-reviewed analyses, not from my own assessment.