The federal venue lottery

Identical claims, very different clocks.

For every case family, the gap between the fastest and slowest district dwarfs any single procedural choice. Each bar spans one nature-of-suit family from its fastest district to its slowest; the dashed line marks the national median for that family.

E.D. Va. is fast — but not the fastest, and not where its name was made.

The “rocket docket” reputation is real but stale. Across its whole caseload E.D. Va. runs at 0.89× national — the 8th-fastest district, not the first. And in patent, the case type that made its name, its 314-day median is the second slowest of the 26 districts measured (n = 599). Filing decisions calibrated to a twenty-year-old reputation are calibrated to a docket that no longer exists.

Every district, every case type.

Median days to resolution for the 30 highest-volume districts. Click any column heading to re-rank; cells are shaded by speed relative to that family's national median — cool = faster, warm = slower.

How these numbers were made.

Within each district we estimate the median time to resolution for every nature-of-suit family using Kaplan–Meier, so cases still pending at the data cutoff are counted rather than dropped. The speed ratio compares a district to the national median within each family, then takes the median across families — holding case mix constant so a heavy social-security docket doesn't masquerade as a fast court.

This note is purely observational; none of its figures come from the Tertius forecasting model. The cleaned data is cross-checked against the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts' published Table C-5 statistics (Spearman 0.86–0.88 by district).