East Texas Topped the Charts Once Again in Q2 as Government Pushed Judge Gilstrap on NPE Injunctions

The Eastern District of Texas was the top patent district for overall litigation (i.e., with no filter for plaintiff type) and NPE litigation in Q2 2025, also taking the number-three spot for operating company litigation. In second for both overall and NPE litigation was the Western District of Texas. The District of Delaware held third place in both categories, though it was the most popular venue for overall litigation.

Shortly before the end of the second quarter, the Eastern District of Texas became the battleground for a new fight over the availability of injunctive relief in NPE suits.

Historically, NPEs seeking injunctive relief in US district courts have faced an uphill battle over much of the past two decades. Under the Supreme Court’s 2006 decision in eBay v. MercExchange, courts must apply a four-factor equitable test when deciding requests for permanent injunctions—including one factor requiring a party to show that it would suffer “irreparable harm” without an injunction. NPEs have typically struggled to clear that threshold, in part because they typically cannot show competitive harm from infringement beyond what damages, as a remedy at law, could compensate.

However, the US government, via the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and the USPTO, pushed the Eastern District of Texas to revisit that standard in a June 24 statement of interest filed in a case from Radian Memory Systems LLC (RMS), a plaintiff tied to Fortress Investment Group LLC, over which District Judge Rodney Gilstrap presides. The government argued that courts should consider the difficulty of valuing patents and calculating damages for their infringement when weighing irreparable harm, asserting that there should be no categorical rule barring NPEs from injunctive relief on that basis.

That said, on July 11, RMS withdrew its request for a preliminary injunction, which had served as the basis for the government’s statement of interest—indicating that the government will need to find another case in which to pursue this issue.

More on the government’s brief—which has already begun to have a ripple effect in other litigation—can be found here. For further analysis of the key trends that shaped patent litigation in Q2 and the first half of 2025, see RPX’s second-quarter review.