The federal Judicial Conference recently issued guidance suggesting that district courts should randomly assign cases involving nationwide injunctions to a larger pool of judges to avoid “judge shopping" when a case is filed in a courthouse with only one district judge. Patent litigators will recognize that this proposed fix is the same one employed by the Chief Judge in the Western District of Texas a few years ago when the only judge working out of the Waco courthouse ended up with a large (some thought unreasonable) proportion of all patent cases in the U.S. If the goal is to avoid the appearance that plaintiffs can pick their judge, randomly assigning cases to a larger pool of judges seems to do the trick. Now, it's up to the district courts to either follow the guidance regarding nationwide injunctions … or not.

The U.S. federal judiciary on Friday made clear that trial courts had discretion to decide how to implement a policy it adopted earlier in the week to curtail the practice of "judge shopping" cases that challenge government policies.

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