A US patent grants its owner the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering to sell, or importing the patented invention. Federal law sets the requirements for obtaining a patent and provides the mechanisms by which a patent owner can enforce that right of exclusion. When suit is brought, an accused infringer can challenge whether the accused product or method actually meets the claims, contend that the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) should never have issued the patent in the first place, or both. The discussion below summarizes the principal trends shaping US patent litigation as of 2026.

The Mechanics of a Patent Suit

Patent infringement actions are filed in federal district courts. For a domestic corporate defendant, venue generally lies in the defendant’s state of incorporation or in a district where the defendant has committed acts of infringement and has a regular and established place of business. The complaint typically maps one or more claims of an issued patent onto a product or process that the defendant makes, uses or sells, and seeks damages tied to that allegedly infringing activity, most commonly in the form of a reasonable royalty or lost profits, with injunctive relief available in limited cases. A patent owner need not practice the invention to sue; standing generally turns on ownership of the patent or possession of sufficient exclusionary rights. Non-practicing entities (NPEs) continue to account for a substantial share of patentee-plaintiffs nationwide.

A defendant may answer infringement allegations by disputing whether the accused product reads on the asserted claims, by challenging the validity of the patent (often on the basis of earlier prior art or shortcomings in the patent document itself), or both. Validity may also be tested in parallel before the USPTO. Patent cases are often tried to civil juries drawn from the venue community, and verdicts can readily exceed nine figures.

Western District of Texas: the End of an Era

The Western District of Texas dominated headlines for several years as patent owners flocked to the Waco Division, where a single judge presided over an outsized share of the nation’s patent docket and moved cases to trial in roughly 18 months, often before any final post-grant review of the asserted patents by the USPTO. That dynamic began to shift in 2022, when the District’s Chief Judge ordered patent cases filed in Waco to be assigned at random across the District’s judges. A 2024 order continued random assignment and required parties seeking transfer to the original Waco judge to demonstrate good cause.

The most significant development of 2026 is the planned departure of Judge Alan Albright, who confirmed in April 2026 that he expects to leave the bench at the end of August to return to private practice. Although random assignment had already diluted the concentration of patent cases before any one judge, Judge Albright still received more than 130 patent cases in the year preceding his announcement. His exit may further redistribute filings within the District and beyond it, with the Eastern District of Texas, the District of Delaware and other long-standing patent venues positioned to absorb some cases that might previously have been styled for Waco or Austin.

According to full-year 2025 data, the Eastern District of Texas remained the single most popular venue at roughly 27.7% of all patent filings, followed by the Western District of Texas (about 11.5%), the District of Delaware (about 11.4%), the Northern District of Illinois (about 8.5%) and the District of New Jersey (about 5.0%) (Unified Patents). The California districts, home to a large concentration of technology defendants, and Delaware, the state of incorporation for many of the country’s largest companies, will continue to draw significant filings on venue grounds alone.

Post-Grant Practice in Flux

Inter partes review (IPR), post-grant review (PGR) and ex parte re-examination (EPR) remain the principal administrative routes for testing patent validity outside the district courts. IPRs and PGRs are decided by administrative patent judges at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB); EPRs are handled by specialized examiners and have continued to attract growing interest as a less procedurally intensive alternative to PTAB trials.

The discretionary denial doctrine – the framework the PTAB uses to decline institution of an otherwise meritorious petition because of parallel litigation – has been the most volatile area of post-grant practice. The Vidal-era 2022 guidance, which limited the impact of the Fintiv factors and gave significant weight to Sotera stipulations, was effectively rescinded in 2025. Former acting Director, now Deputy Director, Coke Morgan Stewart broadened the bases for discretionary denial and introduced a “settled expectations” doctrine, and current Director John Squires has continued to centralize institution decisions, initially through summary denials and more recently through a small but growing number of grants that emphasize the strength of Sotera-Plus stipulations. A March 2026 memorandum from Director Squires added three further factors to the institution analysis, including the extent to which the accused products or competing patent owner products are manufactured in the United States and whether the petitioner is a small business sued on the patent-at-issue.

The numerical effect of these shifts is meaningful. In fiscal year 2025, the petition institution rate fell to approximately 50% when Director discretionary denials were included, and only about 26% of resolved petitions reached a final written decision, a drop of more than ten percentage points relative to recent norms (USPTO PTAB Statistics). The USPTO has also issued a memorandum, effective for petitions filed on or after 1 September 2025, requiring stricter compliance with 37 CFR Section 42.104(b)(4) and clear identification of where each claim element is found in the cited prior art. Petitioners who once treated institution as a near-default outcome must now plan, plead and stipulate accordingly.

The ITC’s Continued Rise

The US International Trade Commission (ITC) remains an increasingly attractive forum for patentees seeking relief that the district courts cannot easily provide – chiefly an exclusion order barring importation of infringing products and a cease-and-desist order reaching products already in US inventory. ITC investigations are statutorily required to conclude at the earliest practicable time, typically with an evidentiary hearing within ten months of institution and a final Commission determination within roughly 18 months. In FY 2025, USITC statistics reported 119 active Section 337 investigations and 57 new complaints and ancillary proceedings (USITC Statistics). With injunctive relief in district court still constrained by eBay and parallel PTAB proceedings less likely to stay an ITC investigation, the Commission’s docket is expected to remain robust.

Industry Trends Shaping the Docket

Beyond procedural shifts, several substantive currents are reshaping the kinds of cases that come through the courts.

Artificial intelligence

The first wave of generative-AI litigation has been driven primarily by copyright owners, but patent suits implicating training pipelines, model architectures, inference acceleration, and retrieval systems are now appearing on district court dockets. Patentees in this space face well-funded defendants and significant Section 101 risk, and damages theories are still being tested.

Standard-essential patents (SEPs) and FRAND

SEP disputes have grown more global and more aggressive. The Federal Circuit’s Ericsson v Lenovo decision has revitalized US anti-suit injunction practice, and major implementers continue to face multi-jurisdictional campaigns by SEP holders. The Unified Patent Court (UPC) in Europe has emerged as a meaningful forum for SEP disputes, and US counsel are increasingly coordinating SEP strategies across US, EU and UPC proceedings.

Life sciences and Hatch-Waxman

ANDA filings and biosimilar disputes continue to drive a significant share of pharmaceutical litigation, and recent industry data shows a measurable uptick in Hatch-Waxman activity. Skinny labels, induced infringement, and patent-listing disputes around the Orange Book remain active battlegrounds.

Semiconductors

As leading-edge fabrication shifts from planar transistors to gate-all-around and other 3D architectures, patent activity is concentrating around process-transition technologies, advanced packaging, and memory technologies. These cases raise difficult questions about access to highly sensitive process information and present complex supply-chain discovery issues.

Looking Ahead

Patent litigation in 2026 is shaped less by any single venue than by the interaction among district courts, the PTAB and the ITC, against a backdrop of intensifying technology-sector activity. Petitioners face a more demanding PTAB; patent owners face heightened damages-expert scrutiny on appeal; and parties on both sides are increasingly evaluating venue choice in light of Judge Albright’s departure and the redistribution of Texas filings. As AI, SEP, life sciences and semiconductor disputes continue to grow, sophisticated parties are calibrating strategy across all three forums simultaneously rather than treating any one of them as the default.