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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 now 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, which receives far fewer patent litigation cases. In 2002, 32 patent lawsuits were filed in the Eastern District of Texas. In 2015, the district received 2,540 patent litigation cases. This constituted 43.6% of all patent litigation cases filed in the United States in 2015. 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 from 1995 to 2014 involving [[Non-Practicing Entities|non-practicing entities]] (NPEs) as patent holders, and 49 percent of these NPEs were successful in their patent litigation cases. The Eastern District of Texas decided a total of 148 patent litigation cases from 1995 to 2014, which means that decisions involving NPEs made up 37% of the total decisions in the Eastern District of Texas during this time period.
