Comprehensive Data about Federal Circuit Opinions

Jason Rantanen (Iowa) has already blogged about his new article, but I thought I would mention it briefly has well. He has created a database of data about Federal Circuit opinions. An article describing it is forthcoming in the American University Law Reviw on SSRN and the abstract is here:

Quantitative studies of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's patent law decisions are almost more numerous than the judicial decisions they examine. Each study painstakingly collects basic data about the decisions-case name, appeal number, judges, precedential status-before adding its own set of unique observations. This process is redundant, labor-intensive, and makes cross-study comparisons difficult, if not impossible. This Article and the accompanying database aim to eliminate these inefficiencies and provide a mechanism for meaningful cross-study comparisons.

This Article describes the Compendium of Federal Circuit Decisions ("Compendium"), a database created to both standardize and analyze decisions of the Federal Circuit. The Compendium contains an array of data on all documents released on the Federal Circuit's website relating to cases that originated in a federal district court or the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)-essentially all opinions since 2004 and all Rule 36 affirmances since 2007, along with numerous orders and other documents.

This Article draws upon the Compendium to examine key metrics of the Federal Circuit's decisions in appeals arising from the district courts and USPTO over the past decade, updating previous work that studied similar populations during earlier time periods and providing new insights into the Federal Circuit's performance. The data reveal, among other things, an increase in the number of precedential opinions in appeals arising from the USPTO, a general increase in the quantity-but not necessarily the frequency-with which the Federal Circuit invokes Rule 36, and a return to general agreement among the judges following a period of substantial disuniformity. These metrics point to, on the surface at least, a Federal Circuit that is functioning smoothly in the post-America Invents Act world, while also hinting at areas for further study.

The article has some interesting details about opinions and trends, but I wanted to point out that this is a database now available for use in scholarly work, which is really helpful. The inclusion of non-precedential opinions adds a new wrinkle as well. Hopefully some useful studies will come of this