The Small Town Judge Who Sees a Quarter of the Nation’s Patent Cases
The Small Town Judge Who Sees a Quarter of the Nation’s Patent Cases
WRITTEN BY KALEIGH ROGERS
May 5, 2016 // 08:00 AM EST
The first thing people tell you about Judge Rodney Gilstrap is that he’s not from Marshall. In the small Texas city (population 24,000) east of Dallas where he presides as a US district court judge, where you’re from matters, and the 59-year-old Gilstrap was actually born in Pensacola, Florida. But because he earned both his BA and his law degree at Baylor University (three hours away in Waco, Texas), has practiced law in Marshall since the 80s, and married a local girl whose family owns the town funeral home, most folks forgive Gilstrap this blight.
They also probably cut him some slack because of how he’s run his court for the last five years.
Since taking the bench in 2011—moving literally across the street from his law office into the district courthouse—Gilstrap has become one of the most influential patent litigation judges in the country. In 2015, there were 5,819 new patent cases filed in the US; 1,686 of those ended up in front of Judge Gilstrap. That’s more than a quarter of all cases in the country; twice as many as the next most active patent judge.
These include some of the most contentious and headline-grabbing patent disputes in the US. There’s the 2013 case where a jury awarded a patent troll $2.3 million, a decision Gilstrap later overturned. There was also the $533 million patent troll win in a case against Apple, a decision Gilstrap has now stayed to allow for appeal.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-small-town-judge-who-sees-a-quarter-of-the-nations-patent-cases?utm_source=mbfb
