On March 27, 2024, Law360 quoted Sarah Brooks on recent U.S. court guidance that is aimed at deterring “judge shopping” for patent cases.
According to the article, the guidance from the Judicial Conference of the United States encourages district court chief judges to adopt practices to prevent litigants from being able to effectively choose who will oversee their case by filing suit in a court with only a single federal judge. The conference suggested that the guidance is especially important when a case seeks to block nationwide enforcement of a law.
However, attorneys said that judge shopping has mostly been an issue in patent suits filed in the Western Districts and Eastern District of Texas, and those courts have adopted policies that are at least partly in line with the guidance, which courts are not required to follow, Law360 reported
“I don’t think it will impact patent cases in the short term,” Brooks explained. “The way I read the guidance, it was more as a kind of warning,” with the Judicial Conference saying, “Let’s not let what happened in West Texas happen again.”
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