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Judge T. John Ward began hearing patent cases after he was sworn in on the East Texas federal bench in 1999 and developed a set of rules for the court that counteracted the traditionally slow pace of patent cases. These changes, including page limits on document and strictly timed opening and closing documents, earned Marshall the reputation of being a "rocket docket." Consequently, the Eastern District of Texas was soon inundated with patent suits filed by companies who wanted to resolve their conflicts quickly.
However, this "rocket docket" claim is no longer true, as it takes two to three years on average for a patent suit to reach trial in the Eastern District of Texas, compared to around a year in Eastern Virginia. In 2002, 32 patent lawsuits were filed in the Eastern District. In 2015, the Eastern District of Texas received 2,540 patent litigation cases. This constitutes 43.6% of all patent litigation cases filed in the United States, which is more than the cases of all districts outside the top three combined (41.9%). According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the percentage of patent litigation cases in the most active districts continues to increase, leading to increased concentrations of patent litigation in certain districts of the United States. From 2012 to 2015, 4,350 patent lawsuits were filed with Judge Rodney Gilstrap of the Eastern District of Texas, which was 3,000 more cases than were filed with the next highest judge.
PricewaterhouseCoopers statistics show that the Eastern District of Texas had 55 decisions in 2015 involving [[Non-Practicing Entities|non-practicing entities]] (NPEs) as patent holders, which was the most in the country, and 49 percent of NPEs were successful in their patent litigation cases, which is almost double the national average of 26 percent. Decisions involving NPEs made up 37% of the total decisions in the Eastern District of Texas.
The increase in patent litigation in 2015 was caused in part by the rise of high-volume plaintiffs, or patent owners that file at least 10 cases in a calendar year.
