U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York

I'll research the Western District of New York's patent litigation practice before writing.

U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York — Patent Litigation Profile

Court overview. The Western District of New York (W.D.N.Y.) sits in the Second Circuit, with courthouses in Buffalo, Rochester, and Elmira; patent appeals go to the Federal Circuit. It is a small patent venue by national standards. Docket data compiled from Lex Machina showed the district averaging roughly 7–22 patent suits per year across 2005–2012 (e.g., 16 in 2005, 22 in 2007, 15 in 2012), and a Bond Schoeneck & King analysis of PACER data found W.D.N.Y. averaged 32.8 new IP cases per year (all IP, not patents alone) from 2010–2014 — far below the Southern District of New York, and a rounding error next to the Eastern/Western Districts of Texas and Delaware, which together have absorbed more than half of all U.S. patent filings in recent years (Lex Machina 2023, via Law360). I could not verify a reliable, current single-year patent-filing count for W.D.N.Y. from a primary source, so treat the above as directional rather than exact.

Patent docket reputation. W.D.N.Y. is not a "rocket docket." Historically, Lex Machina's 2013 Patent Litigation Year in Review reported W.D.N.Y. as the slowest district in the country for median time-to-trial (2,423 days) — but the report's own caveat, repeated by commentators, is that this figure rested on a single trial that year, so it should not be read as a stable measure of district speed. Patent trials there are infrequent; the district's volume is too low for a meaningful jury-vs.-bench split, and I found no published Lex Machina or Unified Patents analysis characterizing W.D.N.Y. judges as systematically plaintiff- or defendant-friendly. Notably, the district's higher-volume patent activity has included NPE campaigns against local/regional defendants (e.g., Automated Transactions LLC's 2013 suits against Buffalo-area credit unions), alongside operating-company suits against Rochester-based technology employers. Published venue-transfer statistics specific to W.D.N.Y. were not located in my search; I did confirm at least one case transferred into the district from the Western District of Texas (AudioEye, Inc. v. accessiBe Ltd., No. 6:22-cv-06116, reassigned to Judge Frank P. Geraci, Jr.), which indicates the district does receive transferred-in patent work.

Local rules and procedures. W.D.N.Y. has its own Local Patent Rules, developed by a practitioner subcommittee impaneled by Magistrate Judge Jeremiah J. McCarthy and effective January 1, 2014, with an updated set effective January 1, 2024 (nywd.uscourts.gov). The rules are comparatively detailed — closer to N.D.N.Y.'s than to the streamlined S.D.N.Y./E.D.N.Y. rules. They require two rounds of contentions (initial infringement contentions within 14 days of the case management conference; initial non-infringement/invalidity contentions 60 days later; final contentions at 21 weeks, with final non-infringement and invalidity responses 28 days after that) and staggered Markman briefing — opening brief by the patentee, responsive brief, reply, and a surreply (L. Pat. R. 2.1–2.4 and Appendices A–B). The most distinctive feature is a "Model Order Regarding E-Discovery in Patent Cases" (Appendix B), which the rules say the court will presumptively enter and which caps email discovery at roughly five search terms and five custodians, phased after initial contentions — an explicit cost-control measure. Separately, W.D.N.Y. dockets show automatic referral of civil cases, including patent suits, to the court's mediation/ADR program.

Notable cases and tracked matters. The tracked matters on this site are four parallel Flexiworld Technologies, Inc. v. Xerox Corporation actions (Nos. 6:23-cv-06370 through 6:23-cv-06373), filed in late June 2023 over wireless/mobile printing patents (e.g., U.S. Pat. Nos. 10,481,847; 10,140,071; 9,036,181), with Flexiworld accused Xerox's AirPrint, ConnectKey, and Print & Scan Experience functionality. All four were resolved by stipulated dismissal with prejudice under Fed. R. Civ. P. 41(a)(1)(A)(ii), each side bearing its own costs and fees — i.e., no merits ruling on infringement or validity. Other publicly visible W.D.N.Y. patent matters include Steuben Foods, Inc. v. GEA Process Engineering (No. 1:12-cv-00904), ITT Manufacturing Enterprises v. Summit Pump, Schwing Bioset v. Pumpaction, and more recent filings such as Nordsense Inc. v. Ultralife Corp. and Night Cap It, LLC v. JD E-Commerce America (2024).

Judges. The two judges appearing on the tracked dockets are Chief Judge Elizabeth A. Wolford (assigned No. 6:23-cv-06370) and Judge Frank P. Geraci, Jr. (assigned No. 6:23-cv-06371). Both are long-serving W.D.N.Y. district judges who also handled the transferred-in AudioEye v. accessiBe case. Magistrate Judge Jeremiah J. McCarthy is significant to the district's patent practice as the driving force behind the Local Patent Rules. I could not locate published Lex Machina, Unified Patents, or Reuters judge-level analytics ranking any W.D.N.Y. judge on patent outcomes, so I make no characterization of their patent-specific tendencies.

Caveats: Filing-volume figures above rely on older datasets (2005–2014) because I could not verify a current, primary-source count within this review; the widely cited "slowest district" 2013 time-to-trial statistic is an artifact of a single trial and should not be treated as a reliable current measure.