Correction: I have to apologize for sloppy reading. While my facts pulled from the NYT article are accurate, I should have spent a little more time reading the blog post that referred me to the article. Michael C. Smith, a lawyer in the district who was quoted in the article, believes that the claims are misleading. After digging into the numbers and the context behind the assertions in the article, his own conclusion appears to be that, at least in the last year, the performance of the district is very closely in line with the rest of the nation. If true, that would still leave the speed with which the cases get heard as a strong advantage and, perhaps, a reputation of being plaintiff-friendly that encourages plaintiffs to file there and defendants to settle out of court. At any rate, once again, apologies for posting before looking ath the additional context that was right in front of my face.
You may be wondering why I haven’t posted anything about the recent flurry of court documents from Blackboard and D2L. The simple answer is that I don’t have much to say about them. We’ve entered a phase in which there is a lot of jockeying going on–efforts on each side to win the favor of the judge, efforts to win the favor of the jury, efforts to force the other side to show their hand early, and so on. To give a good blow-by-blow analysis would require me to go way beyond my legal knowledge, which is already stretched about as far as I can take it in good conscience.
That said, if you want to learn a little more of the context that drives some of the inside baseball, you might be interested in reading a long article in today’s New York Times about the docket in which Blackboard has filed suit.
Here are a few details:
- Seventy-eight percent of patent cases that go to trial in this district are found in favor of the plaintiffs. This contrasts with less than fifty percent found in favor of the plaintiff in New York and a fifty-nine percent nationwide average.
- The docket has a history of providing “Texas-sided verdicts to winners.” For example, the court recently awared a $73 million verdict in the TiVo/EchoStar patent suit.
- For these reasons, 95% of defandants in patent suits in this district settle out of court before ever going to trial. (Think about this one for a moment. Given this amazing statistic, how would Blackboard have expected D2L to respond to the suit? Those who have claimed that D2L had to defend themselves lest they become perpetually victimized don’t understand how the system really works.)
- Patent cases are heard and resolved much more quickly in this district, averaging 27 months as opposed to 4 years or more in other districts.
The article is well worth reading in its entirety. Very revealing stuff in a lot of ways.
Found via Michael C. Smith’s East District of Texas blog.
I smiled when I saw this post – I have drafted posts three times now in response to the various motions and counter-motions by both D2L and BB that I saw come through Jim Farmer’s invaluable im+m elibrary feed, only to scrap each of them as so much “inside baseball” (I wonder what non-North American readers make of that colloquialism!) For me the only really valuable part of the exercise of reading these documents is to thoroughly entrench my abhorrence for lawyers and lawsuits. And to think that in my once foolish youth I went so far as to getting accepted in law school. Eh gads! What was I thinking?!?
“Inside cricket”?