What is it about East Texas that makes it the preferred venue (from the point of the plaintiff) for patent litigation? in particular, what makes it so hospitable for non-practicing entities?
I know it’s because of some things Justice John Ward did in his tenure there, but have no idea what those things are, why they happened (and were allowed to continue), or how they made it so much easier for patent litigators to succeed there.
Awhile back, but no too long ago, NPR (or one of the public radio program providers) did a program about this very thing. It has to do with the court system. They might have a podcast if you search for it.
This article suggests that the Federal District Court in Marshall, Texas is popular for patent infringement lawsuits because of “a combination of quick trials and plaintiff-friendly juries, many lawyers say. Patent cases are heard faster in Marshall than in many other courts.” Basically, it’s a small city with a Federal court that’s not very busy.
My immediate guess was pretty much what R.P. McMurphy and Dewey Finn confirmed: forum shopping. There’s a famous case about personal jurisdiction studied by every first year law student in civil procedure called World-Wide Volkswagen Corp. v. Woodson, 444 U.S. 286 (1980) that all got started over whether a court in Creek County, Oklahoma had jurisdiction to hear a certain lawsuit. Creek County was notorious among plaintiff’s lawyers as producing some of the most plaintiff sympathetic juries in the nation, so if there was any way to assert jurisdiction there they would file a case there. Similarly, if you’re asserting a patent infringement and you know that there’s a federal court with jurisdiction in east Texas with an unusually light docket and sympathetic jury pool, there’s a pretty good incentive to file your case there.
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN18I1SZ
The article mentions EAST Texas and how the problem started and how this case might fix it.