The Wako federal district court abused its discretion in fining that The Western District of Texas was a more convenient form that the Northern District of California.
The federal district court in Waco, Texas abused its discretion in denying Juniper Networks’ motion to transfer six patent infringement actions filed by a Texas-based patent assertion entity to the Northern District of California, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has decided in granting Juniper’s motion for a writ of mandamus. The district court erred in its analysis of the relevant public and private public interest factors used for determining whether the transferor or the transferee district is the more convenient forum. For example, concerning the most important factor, the relative convenience of the transferee forum for the potential witnesses, Juniper identified 11 witness located in the Northern District of California, while the plaintiff—a company’s whose presence in Texas appeared to be both recent and ephemeral—identified only one witness (In re Juniper Networks, Inc., September 24, 2021, per curiam).
Case date: 23 September 2021
Case number: No. 21-160
Court: United States Court of Appeals, Federal Circuit
A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law.
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