‘Patently Unfair’ Revisited
Today’s Wall Street Journal has a story about U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap in Marshall, Texas, who presides over one of the country’s largest patent-litigation dockets. According to the Journal:
No federal judge in America has heard more patent-infringement lawsuits in the past decade than Rodney Gilstrap, who presides over a small courthouse in Marshall, Texas.
He also holds another record: Judge Gilstrap has taken on 138 cases since 2011 that involved companies in which he or a family member had a financial interest, more than any other federal judge, a Wall Street Journal investigation shows.
The companies included Microsoft Corp. (53 cases), Walmart Inc. (36 cases), Target Corp. (25 cases) and International Business Machines Corp. (9 cases).
A 1974 federal law requires judges to disqualify themselves from cases if they, their spouse or minor children hold a financial interest in a plaintiff or defendant, including the interest of a beneficiary in assets held by a trust.
The story goes into much more detail on Gilstrap’s investments in companies that came before his court.
Back in 2014, I wrote a piece for Texas Monthly about Marshall and its patent litigation “rocket docket.” Then, as now, the out-of-the-way East Texas hamlet remains popular with some of the world’s largest tech companies when they’re looking to enforce their intellectual property claims.
As I wrote at the time:
Over the years, Marshall has earned a reputation as the intellectual property equivalent of a speed trap, a place where juries smack big companies with huge judgments. And over the years federal lawmakers have tried to do something about it, with little success. The U.S. Supreme Court and the federal appeals court in New Orleans have enacted restrictions on new filings. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia declared Marshall “a renegade jurisdiction.” During his last State of the Union address, President Barack Obama was likely thinking about the town when he decried “costly, needless” patent litigation.
As a federal jurisdiction, Marshall has always been a bit unusual. Without an FBI office or a U.S. attorney, its criminal docket is lighter than those at many federal courthouses, which are bogged down with drug cases. But it hardly seems like the ideal venue for intellectual property debates, which are challenging for jurors; only 20 percent of the town’s adult population hold bachelor’s degrees. But the locals have grown up on the edge of one of the world’s richest oil reservoirs, and royalty battles with oil companies have created a strong sense of property rights, whether they relate to patents or minerals. “Marshall was always popular with plaintiff’s lawyers,” says Judith Guthrie, a former federal magistrate judge in nearby Tyler. “The perception was that juries weren’t as sophisticated as in other parts of the district.”
That story hearkened to my days as a tech reporter, covering Dallas-based Texas Instruments, which really made Marshall the courthouse of choice for patent lawsuits.
