U.S. District Court Judge John Holcomb: Doing My Very Best to Get it Right | IPWatchdog Unleashed

As many of you know, last week was IPWatchdog LIVE 2025. The program was a great success. The conversations were excellent. The panels were fantastic, and everyone had a great time. And while the program is named “LIVE” because we do not record or broadcast the panels, we did have several keynote presentations that were recorded for the purposes of using as a part of IPWatchdog Unleashed. One of the segments recorded was my fireside chat with Judge John Holcomb of the United States Federal District Court for the Central District of California, which took place March 4, 2025. And it is this conversation with Judge Holcomb that we share this week for our latest episode of IPWatchdog Unleashed.

Judge John Holcomb is one of us. He was a patent professional—a patent litigator—before he joined the federal judiciary. He was appointed by President Donald J. Trump during his first term. And he serves in the Central District of California, with his courthouse located in Santa Ana, California. Early in his career Judge Holcomb was an attorney for Irell & Manella, which is a familiar name to many of us, and then also a partner for many years with Knobbe Martens.

We began our conversation with the story about how John Holcomb the patent litigator went from private practice to becoming Judge John Holcomb of the U.S. Federal District Court for the Central District of California. I asked: How does one go from being a prominent litigator to getting on the radar screen to be nominated, then become nominated and ultimately confirmed?

“Well, it almost didn’t happen many, many times,” Judge Holcomb explained. “It’s a real rollercoaster process to be confirmed as an Article III judge… you obviously have to get a presidential nomination, but also you have to get the approval of your two home state Senators. So, in my case, at that point it was 2019, it was then the late Senator Dianne Feinstein and then Senator Kamala Harris. So, as you can imagine, it’s not real easy to get an up check from those two senators and the Trump administration.

“If you’re at the top of the Trump list, you’re not going to get the approval of those two Democratic Senators and vice versa. So, I think they’d gone through everybody who was at the top of the list, and it was the bottom of the barrel people that were left. And I’m happy to say that I was right there. I was in the barrel,” Holcomb said in a self-deprecating way to the laughter of the audience.

Ultimately, Holcomb was confirmed on September 18, 2020, by a vote of 83 to 12, literally getting in under the wire because a few days later, Justice Ginsburg died and judicial nominations and confirmations completely shut down, with focus entirely shifting onto filling the new Supreme Court vacancy.

As we pivot from the nomination and confirmation process, I asked Judge Holcomb: Does it surprise you what you are seeing as a district court judge, or were you prepared for the wide array of different issues?

“I don’t think anybody can be prepared for the wide array of issues that a district judge sees,” Holcomb explained. “You show up, you get confirmed, you get sworn in. In my court, the Central District of California, they give you 10 days, and then they start giving you cases. And they’re your cases for all purposes.”

And then we pivot to discussing patent litigation. I made the statement: “I assume as a former patent litigator, you enjoy patent cases.” To which Judge Holcomb, who thus far in about 4.5 years on the bench has handled 159 patent cases, responded: “Oh, yes. I love them.”

I asked: “Does anything surprise you? Maybe starting with maybe patent cases, since that’s where you were most experienced as a litigator, and now you’re a judge, you’re sitting on the other side of the bench. Is there anything in patent cases that surprised you that you weren’t prepared for, you didn’t understand or didn’t appreciate when you were an attorney?”

“Probably the biggest thing would be how few resources I have,” Judge Holcomb explained. “For my cases, I have a judicial assistant and two law clerks. And we split up the cases, even in odd numbers. One of my law clerks, though, is patent trained a little bit—comes from a STEM background. So, she gets all the patent cases. And that’s true every year. So, the point is, when you file a big patent case with me, and there’s a Markman hearing with a stack of documents like this to look at with claim charts and patents and file histories and declarations and everything, it’s just that one law clerk and me who’s going through all that. So, the volume and the absence of resources. At a law firm, at Knobbe Martens, and I expect it’s true of most of the people here, your law firms, you’ll have a team of lawyers working on a big case. I don’t have a team. It’s just one law clerk and me.”

We then pivot to discussing the makeup of the Central District of California, which is in a bit of a transition—my characterization not his. The court has 28 full-time district court judges and although Judge Holcomb has been on the court for just 4.5 years, he is right in the middle of the pack in terms of seniority, with 13 judges having joined the court after he was confirmed.

With a former patent litigator on the court, it is probably not a surprise that other judges might look to Judge Holcomb with questions, and this happened recently during a judicial conference of the judges and magistrates in the Central District of California.

“I was on a panel to present just to my colleagues, the district judges and the magistrate judges. And what they wanted was the few of us who were more patent trained to talk to the other judges about patent cases and answer questions and give them tips,” Holcomb explained. “They wanted the absolute basics. So, I started talking about claim construction hearings and I saw some of my colleagues’ eyes sort of glaze over. And so I went back to basics, the Markman case… and I explained what the holding in Markman was and why it was important and therefore that’s why we have so-called Markman hearings—claim construction hearings. And here’s what happens. This is what a patent looks like… what does it mean to construe a claim? And I used the example of the word adjacent. I said your claim may have the word adjacent in it… Does that mean they have to be touching for there to be infringement? Does it mean they have to be relatively close? Does it mean they can be far apart but there’s no piece of structure in the middle? Could mean any of those things. How do you determine that? So, I just talked about that, and they needed that. The point is judges who are not patent trained don’t know those things. So don’t assume that they do. Don’t obviously raise these issues in a mocking way, but you’re going to have judges undoubtedly who don’t know any of these concepts. So you’ve got to help them along.”

As our conversation proceeded, we spoke about experts, the new Rule 702, Daubert hearings and rulings on expert testimony, we discussed the role of the jury and how Judge Holcomb divides time for trial, as well as the number of patents and claims best suited for a single trial, we also discussed Judge Holcomb’s practice relating to summary judgment motions. As our conversation wound down, we ended on the topic of his judicial philosophy, and to make the point Judge Holcomb told the story of three umpires.

“There’s a story about the three baseball umpires and they’re sitting around after a game talking about the art of calling balls and strikes. And the first umpire says, ‘I calls them as I sees them.’ And the second umpire says, ‘oh no, I calls them as they are.’ And the third umpire says, ‘nah, they ain’t nothing until I calls them.’ And I love that story because it’s three views of reality. ‘I calls them as I sees them.’ That pitch comes in, there’s an objective truth. That pitch is objectively a ball or a strike. And it’s the umpire’s obligation to make that judgment call. And this umpire is saying, ‘I calls them as I sees them.’ I do the very best that I can to determine there is an objective truth and I do my best to perceive it. The second umpire, ‘I calls them as they are.’ There’s an objective truth but he denies that he has any perception error. The third umpire is the cynical view. ‘They ain’t nothing until I calls them.’ And he’s kind of right because if that pitch comes in and it’s way outside the strike zone, but he calls it a strike, it’s going down in the scorebook as a strike. So, applying that to law, I like the first umpire. ‘I calls them as I sees them.’ I believe there’s an objective truth. I believe under the laws given to us and statutes from the Supreme Court, from the Federal Circuit, in my circumstance from the Ninth Circuit, I believe that there’s an objectively correct answer on the motion. And I’m doing my very best to get it right.”

To listen to my entire conversation with U.S. District Court Judge John Holcomb, please visit IPWatchdog Unleashed on Buzzsprout, or download the podcast from wherever you listen to podcasts.

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