On September 21, 2017, a Federal Circuit panel rejected an Eastern District of Texas judge’s proposed four-factor test for determining whether venue is proper over a defendant in a patent infringement action under the “regular and established place of business” prong of the United States patent venue statute. In place of the Eastern District of Texas’s test, the Federal Circuit set forth three requirements for determining what constitutes a “regular and established place of business” under the patent venue statute: (i) it must be a physical place; (ii) it must be a regular and established place of business; (iii) it must be the place of the defendant, rather than that of the defendant’s employee.
