Intellectual Property Report

No Office, No Problem? How Remote Work, Servers, and Kiosks Are Testing the Limits of Patent Venue

Griffin Tolle

For most companies, being sued is stressful enough — but where the lawsuit lands can shape the odds. In patent cases, a federal statute written specifically for patent disputes dictates which courthouses around the country are fair game, and for years patent owners raced to file in a handful of districts perceived as favorable to their side, most famously a stretch of East Texas. A 2017 Supreme Court decision attempted to rein that in, limiting patent suits to places where a company is truly “at home” or genuinely does business. Yet in an economy where employees work from their kitchen tables, data lives on servers scattered across the country, and a storefront can shrink to a kiosk in a shopping mall, courts are now wrestling with a deceptively simple question: what counts as a company’s “place of business”? The answer shapes where a business can be hauled into court,