Juries in the Longhorn State have a reputation for being generous with other people's money. But even by Texas standards, the verdict against Illinois drugmaker Abbott Laboratories this June was a whopper. After a four-day trial a jury in the tiny city of Marshall ordered Abbott to pay $1.7 billion.

It wasn't a case of sympathetic jurors socking it to an out-of-state corporation for injuring one of their own. The plaintiff was Johnson & Johnson, of New Brunswick, N.J. The dispute was a technical one over patents on the companies' competing arthritis drugs, J&J's Remicade and Abbott's Humira.

Companies love to complain about liability lawyers who shop around for plaintiff-friendly jurisdictions. But when they have a patent case to prosecute, they do the same thing. Often they go to Marshall or two other federal courts in the Eastern District of Texas. With lightning-fast deadlines and a preference for putting matters before a jury, the judges there have created a patent plaintiff's paradise.

Read the full story here on the Forbes website.