Drive to 500 N. State Line Avenue in downtown Texarkana and you are looking at one of the most unusual federal buildings in the United States. The U.S. Post Office and Courthouse, completed in 1933, is the only federal building in the country that sits in two states at once. The state line runs straight through it.

The building was designed to show off that split. Its base is pink granite from Texas. Its walls are limestone from Arkansas. The style is Beaux-Arts with Art Deco touches, and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2000. Federal law itself acknowledges the oddity: the statute governing the court allows proceedings to be held anywhere in “the Federal courthouse in Texarkana that is located astride the State line between Texas and Arkansas.”

Out front sits “Photographer’s Island,” the little plaza, redone by both cities in 2021, where visitors plant one foot in Texas and the other in Arkansas for a photo. Local boosters like to call it the second-most-photographed courthouse in America, behind only the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Texas-side court here covers four counties: Bowie, Franklin, Red River and Titus. And it is one slice of a much larger and much more famous court.

The federal court system divides each state into districts. Texas has four. The Eastern District, created back in 1857, runs across the eastern third of the state and is split into six divisions: Beaumont, Lufkin, Marshall, Sherman, Texarkana and Tyler, with an additional courthouse in Plano. Its headquarters is the William M. Steger Federal Building in Tyler. The district has eight active judgeships, plus senior and magistrate judges who help carry the load.

On paper, it is an ordinary federal court that hears the usual mix of criminal cases, civil disputes and government matters. In practice, one category of case made it world-famous: patents.

Patent fights are won and lost on procedure, money and time, and in the late 1990s a federal judge in Marshall figured out how to control all three.

Judge T. John Ward took the bench in Marshall in 1999. The district barely had a patent docket then. It saw just 14 patent cases that year. Ward studied the patent rules used in the tech-heavy Northern District of California, adapted them, and rolled out his own fast, strict local rules around 2000. He set hard deadlines. He sanctioned lawyers who dragged their feet. He famously used a chess clock to ration each side’s time at trial, giving lawyers a fixed budget of hours instead of letting cases sprawl for weeks.

That speed earned the nickname “rocket docket.” East Texas did not invent the phrase. The original rocket docket was the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria, which lawyers nicknamed back in the 1970s for the breakneck pace set by Judge Albert V. Bryan Jr., who was known to rule from the bench on the spot and try entire cases in a single afternoon. Marshall earned the same label for the same trait, and it drew patent owners like a magnet, for three reasons:

• Speed. Fast trials put pressure on defendants. The sooner a company faces a jury, the more tempting it is to settle.
• Friendly juries. East Texas juries built a reputation for siding with patent holders, winning the large majority of trials, well above the national average.
• Predictable rules. The local patent rules and the judges’ deep experience made the district familiar and reliable for the lawyers who filed there again and again.

When Ward retired, the mantle passed to Judge J. Rodney Gilstrap, who still sits in Marshall and is regularly described as the busiest patent judge in the country. The label is earned. In recent years a remarkable share of every patent case in America has been assigned to his courtroom alone. In 2024, he was handed roughly 795 new patent lawsuits, several times more than any other federal judge in the nation.

That concentration has drawn both business and criticism. Supporters say Gilstrap and his colleagues are simply efficient experts who know patent law cold. Critics have accused the court of bending the rules on where a case can be filed to keep cases in East Texas, and some of those rule changes have been struck down on appeal. Either way, the gravity of the place is real: if you want a patent trial, the odds say it happens here.

The district’s dominance hit a wall in 2017. In a case called TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods, the U.S. Supreme Court tightened the rules for where a patent suit can be filed. The justices ruled that, for venue purposes, a company “resides” only in the state where it is incorporated. A few months later, a federal appeals court added more limits, making clear that a lone sales employee working from a home office was not enough to anchor a big company in East Texas.

The effect was immediate. Patent filings in the Eastern District of Texas dropped sharply, and Delaware, where huge numbers of companies are incorporated, became the new hot spot.

But the district did not stay down. By 2024 and 2025 it had clawed its way back to the top, once again ranking as the number one venue for patent litigation in the country, and especially for suits brought by patent-licensing companies. Part of that rebound came from next door: a rival rocket docket had sprung up in Waco, in the Western District of Texas, under Judge Alan Albright, who at one point was drawing close to a fifth of all U.S. patent cases to his single courtroom. In 2022, the Western District changed its rules to spread those Waco cases randomly among a dozen judges, and much of that business flowed back east.

You cannot understand this court without understanding the kind of plaintiff that fuels much of its docket.

A patent does not require you to actually build or sell anything. It is a legal right to stop others from using your invention, and that right can be bought, sold and enforced like any other asset. A company that owns patents but makes no product of its own is called a non-practicing entity, or NPE. Its business is licensing and litigation: it acquires patents and then sues, or threatens to sue, companies that do make things, collecting settlements and royalties along the way.

Critics call the most aggressive of these companies “patent trolls.” The complaint is that some assert broad or shaky patents mainly to extract quick settlements, betting that a defendant will pay to make the case disappear because fighting it in court costs even more. Defenders counter that NPEs let independent inventors and small companies actually enforce patents they could never afford to defend alone.

These plaintiffs are often small limited-liability companies, frequently organized in Delaware or Texas, sometimes operating out of little more than a mailing address. For years, a modest brick office building in downtown Marshall, steps from the federal courthouse, served as the listed address for dozens of them. A whole local economy of hotels, caterers, jury consultants and local lawyers grew up around the trials.

Three patent suits filed in the district in just the past few weeks show exactly how this looks in practice.

Patent damages are meant to compensate an inventor for what the infringement was worth, and in a market the size of the smartphone or pharmaceutical industries, that number can be enormous. East Texas juries have delivered some of the largest patent awards in American history.

A Marshall jury once handed Johnson & Johnson’s Centocor unit a $1.67 billion verdict against Abbott Laboratories over the arthritis drug Humira, in 2009. An important footnote: a higher court threw that verdict out two years later. More recently, in 2025, a Marshall jury awarded roughly $445 million against Samsung in Judge Gilstrap’s court. Year after year, a large share of the nation’s biggest patent verdicts come out of this one district.

Sources for this guide include the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, the General Services Administration, federal law (28 U.S.C. Section 124), the National Register of Historic Places, the court filings in the cases named above, and reporting from Texas Monthly, Vice, the Texas Lawbook, RPX, the ABA Journal and IPWatchdog.