Federal judges are not created with deep and intimate practical knowledge born of experience of the ins and outs of every area of federal law; they get educated by experience like anyone else.
Its EDTX, where the judges (and everyone else, including the local jury pool) have over time gotten more patent savvy, because of the propensity to file patent cases in that district.
Which is kind of the point of the "educating everyone" statement, as I understand it.
I guess. I dunno, I just always see lots of comments about how the EDTX judges are awful/pro-patent/getting kickbacks/whatever. So the idea that, hey, they just needed to be educated by presiding over a few cases... it's odd.
A lot of the comments I've seen to that effect are rank bigotry (I suppose I should disclaim I myself am from flyover country, extreme SW Missouri, which is culturally part of the South, and for that matter my mother is Cajun).
What's so difficult to believe about people being able to learn through experience? If any of these EDTX judges got reversed on appeal, that would have been a learning experience ^_^.
The community of attorneys and jusges handling patent cases didn't have the technical know-how to understand the breadth and depth of fuckery-duckery going on in the realm of obvious software patents, allowing trolls to pull a bankable fast one.
Enough fast ones get pulled and they start catching on. That's who's being educated: the courts and legal community.
The attorneys handling patent cases damn well better have the technical know-how to understand the subject matter they're litigating. As for the judges, this is the Eastern District of Texas.