I’m pleased to say that Legal Analytics provider Lex Machina announced the release its end of year quarterly litigation trends update. The update includes Q42017 trends in the areas of Patent, Patent Trial & Appeal Board (PTAB), Copyright, Trademark, Securities, Antitrust, Commercial, Employment, Bankruptcy Appeals, and Product Liability litigation. This is a valuable source of information for any litigator. That announcement, and excerpts from the report, are reproduced below, courtesy of the company.
I’m pleased to say that Legal Analytics provider Lex Machina announced the release its end of year quarterly litigation trends update. The update includes Q42017 trends in the areas of Patent, Patent Trial & Appeal Board (PTAB), Copyright, Trademark, Securities, Antitrust, Commercial, Employment, Bankruptcy Appeals, and Product Liability litigation. This is a valuable source of information for any litigator. That announcement, and excerpts from the report, are reproduced below, courtesy of the company.
“Patent Litigation at the District Court Level
In the final quarter of 2017, a total of 981 patent cases were filed in U.S. District Courts, a 1.3% decrease over the previous quarter’s total of 994 cases. Cases filed in the calendar year 2017 (4,057 cases) represent a decline of 10.3% over 2016 (with 4,529 cases).
Perhaps the most notable event of 2017 was the Supreme Court issuing its opinion in T.C. Heartland on May 22, holding unanimously that, under 28 U.S.C. § 1400(b) (the statute governing venue in patent suits), a domestic corporation “resides” only in its state of incorporation. Since that landmark decision, patent case filings trends have responded dramatically: the number of cases filed in the Eastern District of Texas has significantly declined and been overtaken by the number of cases filed in the District of Delaware.
Patent Trial & Appeal Board (PTAB)
While the first quarter of 2017 saw a record high number Inter Partes Review (IPR) petitions filed at PTAB (548 petitions), each successive quarter has seen a drop in filings (438 petitions in Q2 and 381 in Q3 and 366 in Q4).
This crest/trough may be related to the Supreme Court’s granting of certiorari in Oil States Energy Servs., v. Greene’s Energy Grp. in June 2017 – a case in which petitioners argue that IPR is unconstitutional, as a non-Article III forum extinguishing a property right without a trial by jury.
Trademark Litigation
Trademark litigation filing trends have been more predictable than patent trends (or copyright). The filing of new trademark cases has declined at a slight rate over the last few years. The fourth quarter of 2017 (953 cases) represents a continuation of this trend.
Copyright Litigation
Lex Machina divides copyright litigation in the U.S. district courts into two subtypes: file sharing cases (those having John Doe or anonymous defendants and accusations based on file sharing technology such as BitTorrent), and all of the other, more traditional cases. As explained in Lex Machina’s Copyright Litigation Report, these cases follow very different dynamics.
Securities Litigation
Fewer cases were filed in Q4 2017 than in any of the first three quarters, but the 406 cases filed still represent nearly twice the volume of quarters from 2010-2016.
The top five districts accounted for just under half (44.2%) of the cases filed in the first half of 2017. Those districts are the Southern District of New York (16.2%), the Northern District of California (8.8%), the Central District of California (7.0%), the District of Delaware (6.1%) and the District of New Jersey (6.0%).”
This comprehensive report goes on to cover the following areas of litigation:
- Antitrust
- Commercial
- Employment
- Bankruptcy Appeals in U.S. District Court
- Product Liability
It also includes informative graphs of the data in the report. For the full report, please visit Lex Machina Q4 2017 End of the Year Litigation Update.
The conclusion of the report states: “Staying up to date on the latest trends in case filing is a way to begin integrating Legal Analytics into your practice. However, the full power of Lex Machina is the ability to ‘twist the dials’ to get data relevant to answering your questions: compare date ranges, filter by tag, party, or judgment event, or analyze how outcomes differ between districts. With tags, findings, and damages customized to each practice area, Lex Machina can give you the winning advantage.”
“About Lex Machina
Lex Machina’s award-winning Legal Analytics® platform is a new category of legal technology that fundamentally changes how companies and law firms compete in the business and practice of law. Delivered as Software-as-a-Service, Lex Machina provides strategic insights on judges, lawyers, parties, and more, mined from millions of pages of legal information. This allows law firms and companies to predict the behaviors and outcomes that different legal strategies will produce, enabling them to win cases and close business.
Lex Machina was named “Best Legal Analytics” by readers of The Recorder in 2014, 2015 and 2016, and received the “Best New Product of the Year” award in 2015 from the American Association of Law Libraries.
Based in Silicon Valley, Lex Machina is part of LexisNexis, a leading information provider and a pioneer in delivering trusted legal content and insights through innovative research and productivity solutions, supporting the needs of legal professionals at every step of their workflow. By harnessing the power of Big Data, LexisNexis provides legal professionals with essential information and insights derived from an unmatched collection of legal and news content—fueling productivity, confidence, and better outcomes. For more information, please visit https://lexmachina.com/.”
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