Whither Thee, E.D. Texas?

"Okay, so what am I doing? I'm chasing this guy... No, he's chasing me."

- Memento (2000)


LegalMetric has released a study analyzing the fastest districts, along with percentage of cases filed by division, case win rates by division, appeal affirmance rates by division, and average time to termination on the merits by division.

This year, a number of surprises appear in the study.

The press release from LegalMetric reveals that the five fastest patent districts (measured in terms of average time to judgment) are:

• The Eastern District of Virginia

• The Central District of California

• The Middle District of Florida

• The Western District of Wisconsin, and

• The Western District of Washington.

Courts with fewer than 30 cases terminated by judgments (either in favor of the patentee or the accused infringer) were not considered.

One of the biggest shocks is that the Eastern District of Texas does not come close to making the top five (it ranks 18th).

What's even more interesting is that LegalMetric reportedly told Michael Smith from the EDTexweblog that the win rate in favor of patentees in the Eastern District of Texas is 44%. Unfortunately, the methodologies used in developing this number aren't known, so there's no way to currently verify the accuracy of this number.

View the the LegalMetric press release here (link).