U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas (W.D. Tex.)

I'll research the court's patent practice before writing.

Court overview

The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas sits in the Fifth Circuit (patent appeals go to the Federal Circuit) and is organized into seven divisions — San Antonio, Austin, Waco, El Paso, Midland‑Odessa, Del Rio and Pecos. It is a mid‑sized district in overall civil terms but a top‑three patent venue nationally. Patent filings there went from roughly 88 in 2018 to 978 in 2021 (about 95% of them in Judge Albright's one‑judge Waco court), then fell to 878 in 2022 and 375 in 2024 — a 57% decline — after the district began randomly assigning Waco patent cases (Lex Machina data reported by The Texas Lawbook). Patexia counts 3,480 patent cases in the district between July 2020 and June 2025, second only to the Eastern District of Texas; Lex Machina's 2025 report put W.D. Tex. at roughly 11.5% of U.S. patent filings for 2024 (EDTX first; D. Del. 11.4%), and RPX ranked it the second‑most popular venue for NPE filings in 2025.

Patent docket reputation

The district earned a "rocket docket" reputation largely through Judge Albright: roughly eight months from filing to Markman and about 24 months to trial in his cases, against a Sedona Conference estimate of roughly 29 months average time to trial in W.D. Tex. (vs. ~26 in EDTX) — still among the fastest districts studied. A LegalMetric district report (Jan. 2000–July 2025) counts 43 patent trials, 42 of them jury trials and 1 bench trial, i.e. patent trials here are effectively jury trials; the same report lists a 61% affirmance rate across 121 completed appeals. The district's reputation as plaintiff‑friendly was driven less by verdict rates than by procedure — early claim construction, post‑Markman fact discovery, retention of cases rather than transfer, and (per contemporaneous industry and press criticism) reluctance to stay for IPR or dismiss on § 101 at the pleading stage. That posture produced repeated Federal Circuit mandamus reversals of transfer denials under Fifth Circuit § 1404(a) law — In re Apple (2020), In re Adobe, In re Google I & II, In re TracFone, In re Juniper Networks — plus In re Apple (2021) vacating an intra‑district re‑transfer from Austin back to Waco. The July 25, 2022 order of then‑Chief Judge Orlando Garcia, requiring new Waco patent cases to be randomly assigned among the district's 12 Article III judges, was the direct response to that concentration; it was reaffirmed by Chief Judge Alia Moses in December 2022 and amended May 30, 2024 (adding Judges Schydlower and Gonzalez and requiring a justified motion for related‑case reassignment). A further amended assignment order in May 2026 left that regime in place (Sidley, June 2026; MLex, May 2026), though in practice Midland‑Odessa — a single‑judge division not covered by the Waco randomization — has become a venue‑certainty alternative before Judge David Counts.

Local rules and procedures

The district has no district‑wide patent local rules comparable to EDTX's P.R. 1‑5. Patent practice is governed by the district's general Local Court Rules plus judge‑specific standing orders, above all Judge Albright's Order Governing Proceedings (OGP) – Patent Cases, which other judges have adopted only in part. Key features of that OGP: preliminary infringement contentions seven days before the case management conference; preliminary invalidity contentions seven weeks after; exchange of claim terms nine weeks after; agreed scheduling order two weeks after; fact discovery stayed until after the Markman hearing except venue, jurisdictional and claim‑construction discovery; capped venue/jurisdictional discovery; transfer‑motion briefs limited to 15/15/5 pages; no numerical cap on MSJs, Daubert motions or motions in limine, but cumulative page caps (40/40/15); paper chambers copies ten days before hearings. Albright also issued a standing order limiting venue and jurisdictional discovery and a standing referral of patent discovery disputes to Magistrate Judge Derek Gilliland in Waco. On claim construction, Albright's practice was to issue preliminary constructions before the hearing and have the party opposing the court's tentative construction argue first. Whether Judge Christopher Wolfe adopts any of the Albright OGP is, as of mid‑2026, an open question flagged by practitioners.

Notable cases and trends

The largest matters on this docket have been VLSI Technology LLC v. Intel Corp. (a $2.175 billion Waco jury verdict in 2021, one of the largest patent verdicts in U.S. history, with the $1.5 billion component later vacated and retried to a substantially smaller reported award), Sonos, Inc. v. Google LLC (a $32.5 million Waco jury verdict in 2023), and the Fintiv v. Apple transfer litigation that produced the Federal Circuit's 2021 mandamus on intra‑district re‑transfer. The dominant trend of the last four years is institutional rather than case‑specific: dispersal of Waco filings, Albright's move from Waco to the Austin division in 2024, his announced departure from the bench at the end of August 2026 for private practice (reported by Bloomberg Law, ABA Journal and IPWatchdog), and the transfer of his Waco patent matters to newly confirmed Judge Wolfe, who was reassigned roughly 30 of them in May 2026. Albright left a substantial backlog — Bloomberg Law reported 446 motions undecided for six months or more as of September 2025 and 70% of the district's civil cases pending three years or longer.

The one case this site tracks here is Sterling Computers Corporation v. Microsoft Corporation (filed April 17, 2024; active). I could not verify its posture in the sources available to me; public reporting on that dispute has centered on reseller/antitrust allegations rather than a patent infringement claim, so I cannot confirm why it appears on a patent‑focused tracker.

Judges

• Alan D. Albright — appointed 2018 (Waco; moved to Austin 2024; departing 2026). Presided over the overwhelming share of the district's patent docket from 2018–2022 and authored the district's most influential patent standing orders.
• Alia Moses — Chief Judge (Del Rio division), chief since November 2022; author of the December 2022 and May 2024 amended patent case‑assignment orders.
• David Counts — sole district judge in the Midland‑Odessa division; identified in 2025 practitioner materials as the district's second‑most popular patent judge, with plaintiff‑side firms filing there for venue certainty.
• Christopher R. Wolfe — confirmed April 2026 to the Waco seat; inherited Albright's Waco patent cases and, as of mid‑2026, had issued no patent standing orders.
• Robert Pitman (Austin), Leon Schydlower (El Paso) and Magistrate Judge Derek Gilliland (Waco) also appear regularly in the district's patent assignments; Pitman received a substantial share of Waco patent cases after the 2022 randomization order.

I have deliberately not characterized individual judges as plaintiff‑ or defendant‑friendly beyond what the cited Lex Machina/RPX/Reuters‑derived reporting attributes to the court's procedures as a whole; the "patent‑friendly" label attached to the district in 2019–2022 reflects published criticism of its case‑management practices, not a verified verdict‑rate bias, and comparable post‑2022 data by individual judge is not publicly available in the sources I reviewed.