Welcome to Waco! The Impact of Judge-Shopping on Litigation
Christian Helmers, Associate Professor of Economics
Helmers, Christian and Helmers, Christian and Love, Brian J., Welcome to Waco! The Impact of Judge Shopping on Litigation (April 22, 2023). The Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization (forthcoming), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4185189 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4185189
Abstract
We analyze the effect of judge shopping in patent litigation following the appointment of a former patent litigator as the sole district judge assigned to the Waco Division of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. We find that patent enforcers' ability to select, with certainty, a judge widely regarded as patentee-friendly increased the number of cases filed, especially by non-practicing entities. We show that the increase in litigation was driven by both an influx of cases that would not have been filed but-for the judge's appointment as well as a geographic reallocation of cases that would have been filed regardless. Overall, judge shopping in the Western District of Texas induced over a 33-month period an increase of around 460 patent cases that otherwise would not have been filed.