The Eastern District of Texas was once just a place where American companies went to get fast justice when they wanted to sue a foreign competitor over patents. But US intellectual property laws cuts both ways. An expanding set of lawsuits between Huawei and its competitors is the clearest sign yet that Chinese companies are quickly learning to use IP law to gain an edge over their competitors.

Shenzhen-based Huawei sued (PDF) T-Mobile last week, asking for a judicial ruling that it's following the right rules for using "standard essential" patents, which require patents to be licensed on a "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" (or "FRAND") basis. The new lawsuit is a kind of follow-on lawsuit for four patent infringement lawsuits that Huawei filed against T-Mobile in January, all based in the Eastern District of Texas. (Here's one complaint (PDF) from the four January cases.)

Huawei and T-Mobile have been in legal conflict since 2014, when T-Mobile alleged that Huawei stole trade secrets related to cellphone-testing robots. That case is set to go to trial in October. Huawei denies any wrongdoing.

T-Mobile isn't the only company that Huawei has pursued over patents, either. In May, Huawei filed patent cases against Samsung in both US and Chinese courts. On Thursday, Huawei filed a second case against Samsung in the Quanzhou Intermediate People's Court. The company called it a "technical filing" that was required by the first Chinese case, filed in Huawei's home city of Shenzhen.

Huawei became the world's largest maker of telecom equipment in 2012. It's also the third-largest maker of smartphones, after Apple and Samsung.

Eastern Frontier

However the cases turn out, Huawei's litigation barrage marks the end of an era in which Chinese companies were always on the defensive in IP disputes.

The Eastern District of Texas, in particular, has long been used for American companies—whether big corporations or patent trolls—to extract money from Asian tech companies.

Texas Instruments was the pioneer, building a patent-licensing juggernaut by using East Texas courts to sue Asia-based competitors for patent infringement. Dallas-based TI lawyers began heading east in the 1990s when the relatively unclogged courts of the Eastern District offered a much faster time to trial than Dallas, which is in the Northern District of Texas.

Texas attorney T. John Ward encountered his first patent case in 1998 when he was part of a team hired to defend Hyundai against Texas Instruments' patent infringement claims. The trial ended with TI winning a $25 million verdict. Hyundai ultimately signed a licensing deal with that was worth more than $1 billion to TI.

Ward later became a federal judge and presided over the Eastern District's rise as a favored patent venue. Last year, more patent lawsuits were filed in East Texas than any other judicial district in the country. The venue has been singled out by patent reform advocates who say the rules followed there are particularly unfair for defendants.