NOVEMBER 2008
Birth of a rocket-docket
US Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker has recently taken on a bigger role at the nation's latest patent rocket-docket. Eileen McDermott spoke to him about how the Court will continue to handle the heavy patent caseload minus one judge, as well as what the future holds
| One-minute read |
| With US District Judge John Shabaz indefinitely on leave, Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker of the US District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin has been suddenly thrust into this increasingly popular IP venue's patent wheel. While Crocker has been handling the Court's pre-trial motions in patent cases since 1992, he's only been trying patent suits since April this year. As a former federal prosecutor, Crocker's background is in criminal law, but he's quickly becoming a patent specialist. Here, Crocker speculates about how and why the Court has become such a desirable place to try patent cases and shares some of the secrets of one of the fastest courts in the nation. |
"We didn't aim to become an IP court," says Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker of the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin. Crocker left his career as a federal prosecutor for the US Department of Justice and joined the Court as magistrate judge in 1992. During that time, the number of patent cases heard by the Court has grown exponentially. And yet, with a median time of 4.8 months from the date of filing a complaint to the disposition and no civil cases pending for more than three years as of 2007, the Western District of Wisconsin beats the speed of the nation's two best-known rocket dockets (the Eastern District of Texas and the Eastern District of Virginia) and is also said to have the lowest claim construction reversal rate in the country (see "Your guide to US patent venues", Managing IP, September 2008). But Crocker will tell you he doesn't pay attention to such statistics. "It's not the kind of thing that the judges would have thought about much because we never asked for this," he says. "It's just that by virtue of experience we have been drawn into this."
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