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Federal judiciary leaders on Friday released the text of a revised policy directing district courts to assign judges at random in civil cases that have statewide or national implications, making clear that the policy is a recommendation and that they cannot force district courts to follow it, the Washington Post reported. The Committee on Court Administration and Case Management of the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policymaking body for the federal courts, released the guidance after receiving intense pushback about the change from judges, conservative lawmakers and judicial experts. On Tuesday, conference officials announced that cases with statewide or national implications that are filed in single-judge divisions should no longer be automatically assigned to the judges who preside there. Such divisions exist in rural parts of the country where courthouses are spaced very far apart. District courts may continue to assign cases to a single-judge division if those cases don’t seek to bar or mandate state or federal actions through declaratory judgment or injunctive relief, the Judicial Conference said. When random assignments are required, the case should be assigned to a judge within the same judicial district. The policy does not apply to criminal or bankruptcy cases, according to the memo released Friday. “Case assignment in the bankruptcy context remains under study.” The memo, shared with district court judges across the country, includes guidance explaining how the judges might follow the updated rule “while recognizing the statutory authority and discretion that district courts have with respect to case assignment.”

The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) said business and banking groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, engaged in "forum-shopping" when they sued in Fort Worth, Texas, to block a rule aimed at lowering credit card late fees, Reuters reported. The CFPB urged a federal judge there to deny an injunction blocking the rule while the case is in progress. The regulator said that the lawsuit is likely to fail in part because it was filed in the wrong place. The late-fee rule passed last week applies only to around 35 of the largest card issuers, none of which is based in Fort Worth, the regulator said. Only one of the groups that sued, the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, is based in the court district, and the member it claims was harmed is a bank in Utah, the regulator said in court papers filed on Tuesday. "Far-flung entities cannot just pay membership fees to an association in their venue of choice to gain access to that venue," the CFPB wrote. The groups sued last week over the rule, which says that credit card issuers with more than 1 million open accounts can only charge $8 for late fees, unless they can prove that higher fees are necessary to cover their costs. The previous rule allowed issuers to charge up to $30, or $41 for subsequent late payments. The CFPB has said the change will save consumers $10 billion annually.

A Texas bankruptcy judge denied the Justice Department’s motion seeking to dismiss or transfer the Sorrento Therapeutics chapter 11 case, ruling a bank account and mailbox the company’s lawyers established justified its bankruptcy petition in Houston days later, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Judge Christopher Lopez of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston on Monday said the motion filed by the U.S. trustee for the Southern District of Texas last month and a similar motion filed by a shareholder weren’t timely, as the case had already been pending for more than a year. Sorrento’s bankrupt subsidiary Scintilla Pharmaceuticals’ representation about the mailbox being its principal place of business had been public ever since it filed the petition last February, the judge said. The judge also said that if the case was transferred to a different state, it would take a long time for another judge to get up to speed on it, and he didn’t think that was in the best interest of the administration of justice. The U.S. trustee, which serves as a bankruptcy watchdog on behalf of the Justice Department, submitted a motion before Monday’s court hearing, arguing that Sorrento was a “case of forum shopping and venue manipulation taken to a new and unprecedented extreme.”