In a new article from Bloomberg Law, St. Louis patent litigator Doug Robinson responds to Google and YouTube’s failed bid to change venues in a patent infringement suit over audio and video technologies.

Google had attempted to move the suit from Delaware to Northern California. In her opinion to keep the case in Delaware, Judge Maryellen Noreika cited that Google is incorporated in Delaware and had brought litigation in the state in the past — two factors that were unsurprising strikes against its request.

The motion to transfer a patent infringement case out of the District of Delaware was a long shot to begin with, says Robinson. The tech giant would have also had to overcome the state’s preference for keeping litigation proceedings involving Delaware corporations in Delaware as well as their insistence that proceedings in their state move at a faster speed than other districts. The latter is a supposed benefit to its corporations.

“A lot of litigants are okay with litigating in Delaware. It’s a sophisticated district. They understand patent law,” says Robinson.

Although Google may have had a good argument in moving the case closer to its engineering team and expert witnesses based in Silicon Valley, the Judge ultimately decided against their request.

“Google and YouTube are big national companies. It’s tough for them to say it’s an inconvenience for them to litigate anywhere in the country when they operate everywhere in the country. This motion is for someone who’s truly a small local company,” Robinson said.

“These are very difficult motions to win unless you have compelling facts — specifically, facts that make it almost prohibitively inconvenient to litigate there,” he added. “Now that the venue standard has been tightened, there likely will be fewer cases in which the venue is technically proper but is still so inconvenient that the case should be transferred.”

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