About Patent Case Watch

Patent Case Watch is a free, public research starting point: a browsable, searchable index of patent-case opinions and orders from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Every document is published by the U.S. Government Publishing Office in the govinfo.gov USCOURTS collection, queried for the two courts with a patent nature-of-suit. Each record links to the official government document, and each detail page shows the date the archive was retrieved. The PDFs are served by govinfo — they are not re-hosted here.

It is not legal advice, not a complete legal database, and not a substitute for reading the opinions themselves or for citation-checking in a professional research service.

What the archive does not cover

govinfo publishes the opinions and orders that courts transmit to it — not complete dockets. Briefs, exhibits, hearing transcripts, and some orders are not in the collection, and so are not here. A case’s absence says nothing about whether it exists. The archive reflects govinfo’s coverage, which runs from roughly 2005 onward, as of the retrieval date shown on each page.

The archive is re-checked against govinfo on a rolling basis, and new decisions appear at the top of the feed. govinfo itself publishes on a delay after a court issues a decision, so the newest entry here can trail the courts by days.

How records are classified

The bibliographic fields — decision date (taken from the signature block, the “Decided:” line, or the filing stamp), judge, and document type — are extracted programmatically from the opinion text and the court’s docket-entry line. Federal Circuit Rule 36 summary affirmances are identified from the docket line itself. Documents cross-listed under several consolidated appeal numbers appear once, with the other docket numbers noted.

The holding and the subject-matter tags are assigned by an AI language model that reads each opinion alongside the clerk’s docket-entry line and chooses from a fixed list — it cannot invent a category. Where the disposition genuinely cannot be determined, the record says “See Opinion” rather than guessing. These classifications are automated and not attorney-reviewed. They are research filters, not legal characterizations, and can be over- or under-inclusive — always confirm against the opinion itself.

Most entries show a verbatim excerpt of the document’s opening passage, clearly labeled: those are the court’s own words, not a summary. A small number carry an editorial summary, labeled as AI-assisted and likewise not attorney-reviewed.

Known limitations

Some documents were published by govinfo as scanned images with no text layer. Their pages say so and offer the PDF as it is. Where govinfo does not serve a document at all, the record is marked “source document unavailable” and no download is offered. Case names appear as they do in court records, lightly normalized for capitalization.

Corrections

If a holding label, date, judge, tag, or link is wrong, please report it. Corrections are made by regenerating the record from the official source document, and every report is checked against that document before anything changes.

Email [email protected]. For a correction, include the document’s govinfo ID (shown in the page address) and what needs fixing.