U.S. District Judge Alan Albright is expected to announce Wednesday his plans to resign from the Western District of Texas bench he has held for nearly eight years and to step down in August.
Judge Albright was appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump and confirmed in September 2018. The news of Albright’s resignation was first reported Tuesday evening by Bloomberg.
A former patent lawyer and partner at Bracewell in Austin, he quickly made his courtroom in Waco a hotspot for patent litigation after he tweaked the local rules for patent cases to shorten the time to trial. For three years, he handled more patent cases than any other federal judge in the country.
That all changed in July 2022, when the then-Chief U.S. District Judge for the Western District of Texas issued an order requiring that all patent infringement lawsuits filed in the Waco division he “equitably distribute(d)” among the 12 federal judges that sat in the district.
Judge Orlando Garcia’s order was issued after U.S. Sens. Patrick Leahy and Thom Tillis wrote to Chief Justice John Roberts complaining about venue shopping by plaintiffs’ attorneys in patent litigation. Multiple sources told The Texas Lawbook at that time that Chief Judge Garcia was pressured by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to take action.
Lawyers in the days that followed told The Lawbook the order was a mistake and said it was wrong to strip patent cases from Judge Albright, who was efficient in his case management, evenhanded in dispensing justice and widely recognized as one of the nation’s leading experts on patent law.
Then, in December 2024, news broke that Judge Albright would be moving his chambers to Austin.
Prior to Bracewell, Judge Albright also served as a magistrate judge in the Western District of Texas for most of the 1990s. He has also previously practiced at Sutherland Asbill & Brennan, Fish & Richardson, Thompson & Knight, Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich and McGinnis Lochridge and Kilgore.
He is a graduate of Trinity University and the University of Texas School of Law. In 2017, he was inducted into the American College of Trial Lawyers.
“It’s a tremendous loss to the federal bench,” said Tom Melsheimer, a partner at King & Spalding who also serves as the firm’s global head of trial and Dallas office managing partner, when asked about the possibility of Albright stepping down. “He was an outstanding judge and worked very hard and was an absolute pleasure to appear in front of.”
“There aren’t all that many lawyers who take the bench these days who have been very experienced trial lawyers, and that’s what made him somewhat different from other judges.”
Mark Curriden contributed to this report.