The Fifth Circuit has been the site of vexing and notorious venue battles, as parties jostle to forum shop – or avoid – districts in Texas and Louisiana. In In re Google, No. 25-40788 (5th Cir. April 7, 2026), a 2-1 panel holds that the district court clearly abused its discretion in denying defendant Google, LLC (a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.) transfer of an antitrust lawsuit to California.
“Google, LLC petitions for a writ of mandamus, challenging the district court’s refusal to transfer a [Sherman Act] suit filed against it by Branch Metrics, Inc., to the Northern District of California. Google argues that the district court plainly abused its discretion in the calculation and balancing of the factors governing transfer. We agree and thus grant the writ of mandamus and direct the district court to transfer this case to the Northern District of California.”
The panel majority discerns two related errors. The first was how the district court interpreted one of the eight factors applied by the circuit, “administrative difficulties flowing from court congestion,” to assess transfer requests. “The district court found this factor ‘weighs against transfer.’ In doing so, it relied on evidence suggesting that its median time to disposition and trial was faster [in the Eastern District of Texas] than NDCA.”
The panel majority holds that comparing court dockets is a “weak signal” because it is inherently speculative. Moreover, “[t]he docket conditions gleaned from median litigation timelines are particularly unreliable here, because this is a complex case. Complex litigation exceeds a district court’s average time-to-trial, due to greater discovery and briefing demands . . . . So even if we give weight to a district court’s view of court congestion in the rare case, that factor is unhelpful here. The median time-to-trial has little to no bearing on the potential delay in a complex case like this one. We hold that this factor does not weigh against transfer here.”
The second error was that the district court supposedly gave this factor priority over all the others. “The district court found all other factors either tipped in favor of transfer or were neutral. So the district court’s determination about court congestion singlehandedly defeated transfer, in violation of our precedent.”
Dissenting, Judge Higginson would hold that the “fact-specific” venue dispute is not mandamus-worthy. Even if the district court relied overly on the court-congestion factor, the dissent observes, the fault lies in the ambiguous Fifth Circuit case law: “[T]he majority is correct to highlight the ambiguity of the fifth . . . factor, but that lack of clarity is ours, so a difficult basis on which to assign patent error. We should clarify the law before we fault a district court for being indisputably wrong about it.”
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