Yit’s been1 *checks notes* fourteen months since I posted on LinkedIn that I would start writing more informally (well, at least outside the in-court advocacy context) about legal issues, especially intellectual property stuff. I have yet to write a post. Well, there is no time like the present! That’s right: my “hello world” post is finally here.
I’m not going to do too much throat-clearing, and nope, I won’t even bother introducing myself. What I am going to do is start a multi-post arc that covers quite a bit of substance through the lens of a huge—well, for patent people at least—recent development: the defenestration of Judge Alan Albright’s unique (and massive) patent docket by the Chief Judge of the Western District of Texas, Orlando Garcia.
The relatively short-lived, but increasingly pitched and divisive, arc of Judge Albright’s docket and jurisprudence provides a useful lens through which to examine pretty much all of modern patent litigation.
And there’s a lot to examine.
So without further ado, here’s how we’re going to do what I’ll call Garcia’s Requiem, a multi-part series that examines Judge Albright’s Icarian ascent—and with it modern patent law itself:
Act 1. Venue, or Wherefore Art Thou (Regularly and Established-y)
Act 2. 101-odd Words on Alice
Act 3. The PTAB, Inter Partes Review, and Judicial Race Conditions
Act 4: High-Octane uncertainty: Section 285 and Patent Fee-Shifting
Act 5. The Trials of Modern Patent Litigation: Who is Filing Patent Cases? and Should We Even Have a Patent System?
Act 6. Venue Part Deux: The Inevitability of the Albright Docket (Start and Finish)
These substantive parts are going to come… when I get a chance. I can’t make promises on dates, because I have a practice to run.2 But you will get these eventually. Because, as I’ve said elsewhere, I have thoughts. I hope you’ll read them.
See Barenaked Ladies, One Week (Reprise Records 1998).
Not a patent one, thank goodness—although I defy you to spend a few years litigating plaintiff-side class actions and then come back to me and call it a break. But I digress. No shop talk here!