---
title: "In a Texas Courtroom, the Schedule A Machine Comes Apart on Paper"
description: "A federal judge in the Eastern District of Texas dismantles two patent suits built on the SAD Scheme template"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-10-05T18:26:50Z
modified: 2026-10-06T21:29:46Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/in-a-texas-courtroom-the-schedule-a-machine-comes-apart-on-p-ab9eb7
language: en
tags: ["patents", "sada", "hague-convention", "service-of-process", "jurisdiction"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# In a Texas Courtroom, the Schedule A Machine Comes Apart on Paper

*A federal judge in the Eastern District of Texas dismantles two patent suits built on the SAD Scheme template*

By Jan Sokol · October 5, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/in-a-texas-courtroom-the-schedule-a-machine-comes-apart-on-p-ab9eb7

## In brief

- Judge J. Campbell Barker of the Eastern District of Texas ruled against the plaintiffs in two Schedule A patent cases on September 30, 2026
- Both suits were filed by Chinese companies against Chinese competitors identified only in a Schedule A list
- The court held the Hague Convention bars service by email on defendants in China, aligning with the Second Circuit
- Amazon checkout screenshots showing a Plano, Texas address proved no completed sale into the forum
- The court refused the asset freeze and sealing, but allowed narrowly targeted subpoenas for records of Texas sales

On the last day of September, in a federal court in the Eastern District of Texas, two lawsuits quietly fell apart. They had been filed by Chinese companies against Chinese competitors and styled, in the fashion of the trade, as cases against a schedule of unnamed online sellers — a Schedule A attached to the complaint like a cargo manifest. Judge J. Campbell Barker read the papers, and then, item by item, began to take them apart.

The pair of rulings — *Shangyou Jiayi Lighting Product Co., Ltd. v. Schedule A Defendants* and *Haiying Liu v. Schedule A Defendants*, both dated September 30, 2026 — were nearly identical, and neither went well for the plaintiffs. Such suits, Judge Barker noted at the outset, can have “an uncertain fit with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and due process.” As [Eric Goldman chronicled on his legal blog](https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2026/10/judge-barker-e-d-tex-disassembles-two-sad-scheme-cases.htm), the genre has a name now — the SAD Scheme — and by the new norm it involves Chinese firms suing their countrymen before American judges, a swift adoption of a home-grown judicial “innovation.”

## The email and the Convention

The first piece to come loose was the service of process. The plaintiff had notified the Chinese defendants by email. Judge Barker’s reply was flat: “Two circuits have now held that the Hague Convention, when it applies, prohibits service by email on defendants in China.” He aligned his court with the Second Circuit’s recent holding on the point.

The plaintiff pleaded that the sellers run their businesses by email and are hard to locate physically. “That answers the wrong question,” the judge wrote. Trading online bears on whether email is reasonably calculated to give notice under the federal rules; it says nothing about whether a physical address is known or discoverable. “Diligent efforts to find a defendant’s address include more than just stating the difficulty of the endeavor,” and the plaintiff had offered no evidence of diligence at all. The email, in short, had not been an address.

## The sale that never happened

Then came personal jurisdiction. Even the theories most generous to Schedule A plaintiffs require a completed sale of an accused product into the forum, and the record showed none. The plaintiff’s proof consisted of screenshots of Amazon checkout pages listing a delivery address in Plano, Texas — inside the district — but no completed purchase. The judge’s sentence deserves to be read twice: “Pages showing that a product could be shipped to the forum do not establish a sale into it.” A cart is not a consignment. A possibility is not a sale.

## The frozen accounts

As is customary in these cases, the plaintiff had sought to freeze the defendants’ money where it sat, in third-party platform accounts. Though it later backed away from binding the platforms directly, Judge Barker flagged the deeper defect: an order levying on the platforms “would still have adjudicated defendants’ interests in their own property without jurisdiction over them.”

A blanket discovery order to unmask the sellers met the same fate — refused. But the judge left a door ajar, of the narrow kind: if the plaintiff believes a platform’s records would show sales of accused products shipped to Texas, “it may move for leave to serve targeted subpoenas for that limited purpose.” Not a trawl, then. A line, cast where the fish might actually be.

## How many defendants fit in a schedule

Schedule A cases, the court observed, often sweep dozens or hundreds of unrelated online sellers into a single action on little more than shared accusations of infringement, and courts have increasingly rejected the practice. Here, the judge accepted joinder: the plaintiff had pared the list and alleged that the defendants were sales channels of one operation, bound by “the same or similar advertising look and feel, product images and descriptions, and tactics to evade enforcement efforts,” satisfying § 299(a) at this stage. Goldman is unconvinced. In his experience, Schedule A plaintiffs recite those very words as a matter of liturgy — what he calls a “standard plaintiff boilerplate roboargument.” A practiced ear hears both accounts and keeps them side by side.

## The unsealed file

The plaintiff wanted the proceeding kept sealed. Temporary sealing has its purpose in an ex parte posture, the judge allowed — it prevents a defendant from defeating relief before the court can act — but the purpose expires with the ruling. And the ruling had gone against the plaintiff. No document under seal was even claimed to hold confidential business or personal information.

> A plaintiff may voluntarily dismiss an action without a court order before defendants answer. But the federal rules protect defendants against repeated litigation of the same claim: A second voluntary dismissal of the same claim operates as an adjudication on the merits.

Those protections, Judge Barker wrote, depend on the prior action being discoverable; leave the record sealed, let the plaintiff dismiss, and neither the defendants nor the next court could learn that the claims had been asserted and the relief denied. “That concern is not hypothetical in Schedule A litigation.” Goldman greets the point with relief — docket transparency, he writes, is “a partial cure” for plaintiffs dragging sellers through lawsuit after lawsuit until the terrain suits them. Partial, he adds; more is needed.

## One side of the room, empty

The temporary restraining order had been sought without notice to the defendants, and nothing specific justified the silence. The plaintiff offered only that the defendants “can and likely will take immediate steps to permanently alter the status quo, including but not limited to steps such as registering new e-commerce stores under new aliases and moving any assets to offshore bank accounts outside the jurisdiction of this Court.” Generic, the judge ruled. Nothing in the record showed these defendants had done anything to suggest flight. The rote presumption — that every Chinese seller given warning will vanish — was, in this courtroom at least, demolished.

Finally, the merits. Ordinarily an accused infringer defeats preliminary relief by raising a substantial question over infringement or validity; here no defendant was present to raise anything. That absence, Judge Barker wrote, obliged the court to weigh the showing “with eyes wide open to the limitations of a one-sided presentation.” Goldman underlines the point: the adversary system runs on defendants exposing the weak seams of a plaintiff’s claim, and judges are poorly placed to intuit what the absent might have said.

So ended two lawsuits in nine days of autumn: the email disallowed, the screenshots discounted, the freeze refused, the seal lifted. The schedule may yet be refiled. But in the Eastern District of Texas, it will be refiled in the open.