Using Insurance to Deter Lawsuits

The conventional wisdom (my anecdotal experience, anyway) is that the availability of insurance fuels lawsuits. People that otherwise might not sue would use litigation to access insurance funds. I'm sure there's a literature on this. But most insurance covers both defense and indemnity - that is, litigation costs and settlements. But what if the insurance covered the defense and not any settlement costs? Would that serve as a disincentive to bring suit? It surely would change the litigation dynamic.

In The Effect of Patent Litigation Insurance: Theory and Evidence from NPEs, Bernhard Ganglmair (University of Mannheim - Economics), Christian Helmers (Santa Clara - Economics), Brian J. Love (Santa Clara - Law) explore this question with respect to NPE patent litigation insurance. The draft is on SSRN, and the abstract is here:

We analyze the extent to which private defensive litigation insurance deters patent assertion by non-practicing entities (NPEs). We do so by studying the effect that a patent-specific defensive insurance product, offered by a leading litigation insurer, had on the litigation behavior of insured patents’ owners, all of which are NPEs. We first model the impact of defensive litigation insurance on the behavior of patent enforcers and accused infringers. Assuming that a firm’s purchase of insurance is not observed by patent enforcers, we show that the mere availability of defense litigation insurance can have an effect on how often patent enforcers will assert their patents. Next, we empirically evaluate the insurance policy’s effect on the behavior of owners of insured patents by comparing their subsequent assertion of insured patents with their subsequent assertion of their other patents not included in the policy. We additionally compare the assertion of insured patents with patents held by other NPEs with portfolios that were entirely excluded from the insurance product. Our findings suggest that the introduction of this insurance policy had a large, negative effect on the likelihood that a patent included in the policy was subsequently asserted, and our results are robust across different control groups. Our findings also have importance for ongoing debates on the need to reform the U.S. and European patent systems, and suggest that market-based mechanisms can deter so-called “patent trolling.”

On reading the abstract, I was skeptical. After all, there are a bunch of reasons why more firms would defend against NPEs , why NPEs would be less likely to assert, and so forth. But the interesting dynamics of the patent litigation insurance market have me more convinced. Apparently, the insurance didn't cover any old lawsuit; instead, only specific patents were covered. So, the authors were able to look at the differences between firms asserting covered patents, firms that held both covered and non-covered patents, and firms that had no covered patents. Because each of these firms should be equally affected by background law changes, the differences should be limited to the role of insurance.

And that's what they find, unsurprisingly. Assertions of insured patents went down as compared to uninsured patents, and those cases were less likely to settle -- even with the same plaintiff. My one concern about this finding is that patents targeted for insurance may have been weaker in the first place (hence the willingness to insure), and thus there is self-selection. The paper presents some data on the different patents in order to quell this concern, but if there is a methodological challenge, it is here.

This is a longish paper for an empirical paper, in part because they develop a complex game theory model of the insurance purchasing, patent assertion, and patent defense. It is interesting and worth a read.

Do Patent Laws Affect the Location of R&D?

One of the common complaints about weakening patent protection is that it causes reduced R&D in the country with weakened protection. I've always been skeptical of this claim in the modern era, because one can develop anywhere and import into a location with better protection. As a result, one would expect that patent protection is unrelated to R&D offshoring.

In a draft article called Offshoring Patent Law, Gregory Day (Georgia Business) and Steven Udick (Skiermont Derby LLP) consider this question. Their article is forthcoming in the Washington Law Review and a draft is on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Legislators and industry leaders claim that patent strength in the United States has declined, causing firms to innovate in foreign countries. However, scholarship has largely dismissed the theory that foreign patents have any effect on where firms invent, considering that patent law is bound by strict territorial limitations (as a result, one cannot strengthen their patent protection by innovating abroad). In essence, then, industry leaders are deeply divided from scholarship about whether innovative firms seek out jurisdictions offering stronger patent rights, affecting the rate of innovation.

To resolve this puzzle, we offer a novel theory of patent rights — which we empirically test — to dispel the positions taken by both scholarship and industry leaders. Since technology is generally developed in one country, the innovation process exposes the typical inventor to infringement claims only in that jurisdiction. In turn, we demonstrate that inventors have powerful, counterintuitive incentives to develop technology where patent rights are weaker and enforcement is cheaper. Given that it typically costs more to defend a patent infringement claim in the United States than to lose one in another country (the cost to litigate a patent in the United States averages around $3.5 million and royalty awards have surpassed $2.5 billion), our empirical research contributes to the theoretical understanding of patent rights by shedding new light on the important, yet largely dismissed, dimension of where innovation takes place.

We received invaluable support from international research organizations and patent attorneys working for top-tier law firms. Notably, the Global IP Project, which is a multinational research group spearheaded by the leading global intellectual property (“IP”) law firm, Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, LLP, as well as Darts-ip, an international organization dedicated to the study of global IP litigation, provided proprietary data, enabling us to explore whether firms optimize value by placing research and innovation in countries with “better” patent laws. To verify our models, we interviewed notable patent attorneys practicing in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

The primary takeaway from their approach is that not only might the strength of the laws matter, but also the costs of defense. To tell this story, they use Marvell as an example, but that was actually a rare case where the R&D and sales process itself constituted infringement to trigger worldwide sales. I would expect that companies can usually design in the U.S., send designs overseas (see Microsoft v. AT&T), and ship from there. Thus, the more important complaint is that patent enforcement causes manufacturing to move offshore, not R&D.

That said, the article performs a regression on R&D and several variables that might affect R&D like tax rates and human capital density, and finds that costs of defense and damages awards are negatively correlated with R&D, while strength of enforcement is positively correlated. This is all reasonable enough, but I'm concerned that the empirical model is incomplete. Though the word "cost" appears dozens of times in the article, not once is it mentioned with respect to the cost of R&D. Might the reason R&D gets offshored be that it's cheaper? And could cheaper R&D also correlate with lower enforcement of IP? My guess is yes, based on the studies I've read over the years. I would have liked to have seen some analysis and discussion of this point.

While I think this is an interesting paper, I think that the model is underdeveloped in two ways. The first is the focus on costs in only half of the equation. The second is the neglect of trade secret enforcement. Unlike patent law, trade secret laws can affect R&D in the country in which the R&D takes place because the developer can lose value without ever selling into that country. Studies by Lippoldt and Schultz and also by Png demonstrate this pretty well.

For those interested in this topic, I recommend this article, and I recommend a contrast with Bilir, Patent Laws, Product Life-Cycle Lengths, and Multinational Activity, in the American Economic Review. Bilir develops a similar model, but bases it on location of companies (which covers some of the manufacturing issues), and considers the life-cycle of R&D (long term v. short term protection) as well as trade secrets. Bilir does not directly consider costs of defense, so it would be interesting to see how that notion from this new article would overlay onto Bilir.

What Drives Product Companies to Sue?

There are many studies of patent litigation, including the reasons that firms litigate - I have worked on some myself. Much of it is really helpful information, but all of the studies lack one key component: the patents that get litigated are highly selected. They are selected for a) the firms that litigate (practicing v. non-practicing), b) the patents that are litigated (individual, portfolio, lead), and c) the cases that are litigated to judgment (default, settlement, summary judgment, trial).

In the realm of which firms and patents litigate, most of the studies have looked at the litigation level, comparing characteristics of patents and technology with samples of those patents and technologies that were not litigated. This is helpful information, but it certainly doesn't tell the whole story. So, Dirk Czarnitzki and Kristof Van Criekingen (KU Leuven Managerial Economics) have used suvey data of Belgian firms to be better understand which firms litigate. A draft of their paper New Evidence on Determinants of IP Litigation: A Market-Based Approach is posted on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

We contribute to the economic literature on patent litigation by taking a new perspective. In the past, scholars mostly focused on specific litigation cases at the patent level and related technological characteristics to the event of litigation. However, observing IP disputes suggests that not only technological characteristics may trigger litigation suits, but also the market positions of firms, and that firms dispute not only about single patents but often about portfolios. Consequently, this paper examines the occurrence of IP litigation cases in Belgian firms using the 2013 Community Innovation Survey with supplemental information on IP litigation and patent portfolios. The rich survey information regarding firms’ general innovation strategies enables us to introduce market-related variables such as sales with new products as well as sales based mainly on imitation and incremental innovation. Our results indicate that when controlling for firms’ IP portfolio, the composition of turnover in terms of innovations and imitations has additional explanatory power regarding litigation propensities. Firms with a high turnover from innovations are more likely to become plaintiffs in court. Contrastingly, firms with a high turnover from incremental innovation and imitation are more likely to become defendants in court, and, moreover, are more likely to negotiate settlements outside of court.

The paper itself is relatively straightforward and the results are unsurprising: firms that seem to rely heavily on big innovation sue more, and firms that "imitate" or make incremental innovations tend to get sued more.

I'm not sure what to make of the finding that defendants who imitate are more likely to settle pre-suit (patent portfolio quality being held equal). I suppose that defendants who are making their own big innovations are more likely to challenge validity or argue noninfringement. Then again, the study finds that imitator defendants are more likely to seek patent invalidity, so it may be that either a) they settle when they cannot do win the challenge, or b) innovator defendants rely more on noninfringement.

I suppose that my primary critique is not so much with the empirical method but with the literature review. I think the discussion could have been informed a bit by reference to some of the legal literature in this area. I realize that most economists see law reviews as articles non grata due to lack of peer review, but there's been plenty of decent enough work in this area to merit comment. For example, this draft argues that it is the first to consider out of court settlements, but Lemley, Richardson and Oliver circulated a draft of comprehensive survey results in 2017. Similarly, the article discusses patent portfolios in enforcement, but doesn't mention any of the several legal articles focusing on these dynamics. This is a small point, but an important one. I think legal scholars should look to the economics literature much more often than they do, and I think economic research wouldn't hurt by doing the opposite every once in a while.

In any event, this is an interesting paper that adds new information about how we should think about what drives competitive company litigation.

Berkeley Remarks on a Patent Small-Claims Tribunal

As noted in my earlier post today with my remarks from We Robot, I’ve been busy with lots of interesting conferences and workshops in the past few weeks. Because I wrote out detailed notes for two of them, I thought I would post them for people who weren’t able to attend. Here are my comments from the fantastic BCLT/BTLJ symposium on the administrative law of IP, where I was on a panel discussing IP small-claims tribunals:

You have already heard some insightful comments from Ben Depoorter and Pam Samuelson on copyright small-claims courts, including their analysis of problems with the proposed Copyright Alternatives in Small-Claims Enforcement (CASE) Act of 2017, as well as their thoughts on how a more narrowly tailored small-claims system might be beneficial. The main justification for introducing such a tribunal is that high litigation costs prevent claimants from pursuing valid small claims.

I’m here to provide some perspective from the patent law side, and the short version of my comments is that the idea of a patent small-claims court seems mostly dead in the United States, and I don’t see a reason to revive it.

Experiments on Bias in Patent Litigation OR Does Everyone Hate NPEs?

Lisa has written about the importance of experiments in patents, and I agree. I read about a really good one today. Bernard Chao (Denver Law) and one of his students, Roderick O'Dorisio, conducted an experiment to simultaneously test whether there is a bias against patentees sued for declaratory relief of non-infringement and against NPEs. To do so, they made identical patent vignettes used to resolve a close, but simple, infringement case. The only differences in the videos shown to the subjects were whether the defendant sued first and whether the plaintiff was an NPE (and in one, both were true). The abstract his here, for the paper forthcoming in the Federal Circuit Bar Journal:

Although everyone believes that telling a good story is an important part of jury persuasion, attorneys inevitably rely on their intuition to choose their stories. Experimental methodologies now allow us to test how effective these stories are. In this article, we rigorously test how two different narratives common to patent law affect mock jurors. First, we look at whether accused infringers can improve their chances of prevailing by being the aggressor. Prior studies have observed that accused infringers that file declaratory judgment actions to vindicate their rights win more often than those that are sued by patent holders. However, these results may simply be an artifact of the selection effects. For example accused infringers may simply be suing on stronger cases. To date, no studies have tried to control for these selection effects and determine whether it is truly the story that sways juries. Second, we looked at whether an accused infringer can influence mock jurors by making a few disparaging remarks about one kind of patentee’s business model, the non-practicing entity (NPE). NPEs, often pejoratively called patent trolls, may have a more difficult time prevailing at trial than practicing entities do.

To test how these narratives affect potential juries, we used a 2x2 between-subjects online experiment. We randomly assigned virtual mock jurors to watch one of four different scenarios of an abbreviated patent trial and render verdicts. The results showed that accused infringers that filed declaratory judgment actions prevailed more often than those where the patentee initiated the lawsuit. In addition, our study found that NPEs won less often than practicing entities. We discuss implications for strategy and policy.

The results are pretty clear - there were marked differences in favor of those who sued first and in favor of those sued by NPEs. And for the group that is both NPEs sued for declaratory relief, the numbers are the lowest of all. I consider this to be a validating check on the findings for each of the individual treatments (though more on that later, as statistically it is not so clear).

As the title of this post implies, there are a couple of ways to read this data. The results here may show an implicit bias against NPEs. Or, NPEs may be the baseline, and it shows a preference for practicing entities. The highest win rate was 39%, so it is not like the plaintiffs were running away with victory here. Or, it may show that taking the bull by the horns is rewarded - patentees prefer defendants who assert their "rights" to defend against infringement.

Nonetheless, the results are a bit shocking - a product making plaintiff was more than twice as likely to win than an NPE sued for declaratory judgment of non-infringement on identical facts and presentations. This makes me think that we have to talk about more than patent quality when we talk about low NPE win rates.

About the statistics: the Declaratory Relief effect was significant at p<.1 (and at p<.05 if you included demographics). The NPE effect was significant at p<.01. Interesting, despite the marked drop for both combined, when the entire model was tested, including the interaction of declaratory relief and NPE, then none of the treatments was statistically significant. This result is difficult to interpret, but my sense from eyeballing the data is that the NPE effect is doing most of the work in the combined model, and so combining the DJ effect with it confounds the model.

A final note on methodology - the authors use Mechanical Turk, and cite to literature that such users are reliable for research like this. They also use some techniques to ensure attention. Finally, if there are attention issues, it is unclear why they would affect one category more than any other. Nonetheless, to the extent that one is skeptical of mTurk, one might be skeptical of the results here.

A Deep Dive on NPE Outcomes

I glibly commented on a friend's Facebook post last week that "patent troll" academic articles are so passe, despite the growing number of articles that use that term as compared to, say, 2012. Now, I shouldn't complain; given that my most cited article is called Patent Troll Myths (2012, naturally), I'd like to think that I'm driving that trend (of course, that's what the folks who wrote in 2007 would say).

But one of the reasons I joked about trolls being so 2012 is that this is where much of the detailed data comes from, and this is when the key articles that are cited by many were published. Indeed, I've published two follow-on articles to Patent Troll Myths, each of which contains more and better data (and thus took longer complete and published later), but which gets only a tiny fraction of the citation love of the original article.

And so it is no surprise that the latest in a series of articles by Chris Cotropia (Richmond), Jay Kesan (Illinois), and David Schwartz (Northwestern) was released with little fanfare. The article, called Heterogeneity among Patent Plaintiffs: An Empirical Analysis of Patent Case Progression, Settlement, and Adjudication is forthcoming in Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, but a draft is on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This article empirically studies current claims that patent assertion entities (PAEs), sometimes referred to as ‘patent trolls’ or non-practicing entities (NPEs), behave badly in litigation by bringing frivolous patent infringement suits and seeking nuisance fee settlements. The study explores these claims by examining the relationship between the type of patentee-plaintiffs and litigation outcomes (e.g., settlement, grant of summary judgment, trial, and procedural dispositions), while taking into account, among other factors, the technology of the patents being asserted and the identity of the lawyers and judges. The study finds significant heterogeneity among different patent holder entity types. Individual inventors, failed operating companies, patent holding companies, and large patent aggregators each have distinct litigation strategies largely consistent with their economic posture and incentives. These PAEs appear to litigate differently from each other and from operating companies. Accordingly, to the extent any patent policy reform targets specific patent plaintiff types, such reforms should go beyond the practicing entity versus non-practicing entity distinction and understand how the proposed legislation would impact more granular and meaningful categories of patent owners.

In my article A Generation of Patent Litigation, I presented data about how often cases settle, and how that skews our view of how long they last, and who wins. This article extends the authors' earlier work on categorizing just who is filing NPE suits (in 2010 in this article), and asks when they settle for each and every defendant. This is hard work. In most of today's cases, each defendant is sued separately, so when the defendant settles, the case is over. Analytics companies track this all the time...now.

But in 2010, a patentee could sue 100 defendants at once, and you could not tell how long each remained in the case without tracking each defendant. If you only track the end of the case, you capture the one defendant who fought it out, but you miss all the defendants who exited early. The other added value of this series of papers is tracking all plaintiffs by type, rather than one big "NPE" status. I do this in The Layered Patent System, but I only had a subset of cases over a longer period of time, They have captured all of the cases in a single year.  I'll discuss what this all means after the jump.

USPTO Economists on Patent Litigation Predictors

Alan Marco (USPTO Chief Economist) and Richard Miller (USPTO Senior Economist) have recently posted Patent Examination Quality and Litigation: Is There a Link?, which compares the characteristics of litigated patents with various matched controls. The litigation data was from RPX, the patent data was from various USPTO datasets, and the controls were either chosen randomly from the same art unit and grant year or were chosen with propensity score matching based on various observable characteristics. They are interested in whether examination-related variables that can be controlled by the USPTO are related to later litigation, and they conclude that "some examination characteristics predict litigation, but that the bulk of the predictive power in the model comes from filing characteristics."

Marco and Miller report that patents filed by small entities are more than twice as likely to be litigated than those filed by large entities, and patents with longer continuation histories and application pendency are also more likely to be litigated. Government-interest patents and foreign-priority patents are much less likely to be litigated than other similar patents. Other characteristics that indicate higher probability of subsequent litigation include having more independent claims and shorter independent claims (proxies for broader patents), being allowed by examiners with signatory authority, not being allowed on first action, having more IDS filings or examiner interviews.

Gugliuzza & Lichtman on the Timing of Patent Litigation

Are patent cases being litigated too quickly or too slowly? Two recently posted articles tackle this problem from different angles:

Paul Gugliuzza's Quick Decisions in Patent Cases argues that patent litigation is "notoriously expensive and time consuming," but that there is a beneficial trend toward quicker decisions through practices such as pleadings-stage dismissals on patent eligibility grounds, post-grant revocation at the PTO, and heightened pleading requirements. These changes have been controversial, and Gugliuzza discusses ways each development might be further improved in terms of the overall tradeoff between accuracy and cost. But overall, Gugliuzza argues that the benefits of faster litigation resolution probably outweigh the downsides.

On the other hand, Doug Lichtman's Patient Patents begins with the provocative claim that "a large number of patent cases are today being litigated too quickly." His basic argument is straightforward: Delay is most costly in cases that potentially involve injunctions, but post-eBay, many patent plaintiffs are denied injunctive relief. In these cases, "delay takes a day for which the accused infringer would have been paying a court-ordered ongoing royalty and transforms it into a day for which the accused infringer will instead pay court-ordered backward-looking damages." Thus, these cases "are the ideal candidates for which to consider tailored, accuracy-enhancing litigation delay." This is not to say that delay is costless; perhaps most importantly, as Lichtman acknowledges, it "increases the duration of patent uncertainty." His point is simply that the optimal balance has been shifted by the increased prevalence of damages over injunctions.

Although these two articles might initially seem contradictory, they are really focused on different aspects of the cost-benefit analysis of litigation timing. Indeed, Gugliuzza notes and does not dispute Licthman's argument, but contends that it does not affect the majority of cases because "nearly seventy-five percent of successful patentees still obtain permanent injunctions, and that figure increases to eighty percent when PAEs are excluded." I think both are worth a read.

(Un)Reasonable Royalties

For the small subgroup of people who read this blog, but don't read Patently-O, I thought I would point to a new article that I've posted called (Un)Reasonable Royalties. I won't write much about it here. Dennis Crouch did a nice review, for which I'm thankful. Here is the abstract:

Though reasonable royalty damages are ubiquitous in patent litigation, they are only one-hundred years old. But in that time they have become deeply misunderstood. This Article returns to the development and origins of reasonable royalties, exploring both why and how courts originally assessed them.

It then turns a harsh eye toward all that we think we know about reasonable royalties. No current belief is safe from criticism, from easy targets such as the 25% “rule of thumb” to fundamental dogma such as the hypothetical negotiation. In short, the Article concludes that we are doing it wrong, and have been for some time.

This Article is agnostic as to outcome; departure from traditional methods can and has led to both over- and under-compensation. But it challenges those who support departure from historic norms—all the while citing cases from the same time period—to justify new rules, many of which fail any economic justification.

The Long Awaited FTC Study on Patent Assertion and Nuisance Litigation

After months of speculation that the FTC's long awaited FTC study on patent assertion entities was going to issue any day now, the study has finally issued. The press release is here, and the full PDF is here.There is a lot to learn from this study - the FTC had subpoena power to obtain data unavailable to mere mortals like the scholars who study this area. I thought that the study was generally balanced and well researched. A scan of the footnotes alone will make a great literature review for anyone new to this area (even if it is missing a couple of my articles...).

Some of the highlights of the study come right out of the press release:

The report found two types of PAEs that use distinctly different business models. One type, referred to in the report as Portfolio PAEs, were strongly capitalized and purchased patents outright. They negotiated broad licenses, covering large patent portfolios, frequently worth more than $1 million. The second, more common, type, referred to in the report as Litigation PAEs, frequently relied on revenue sharing agreements to acquire patents. They overwhelmingly filed infringement lawsuits before securing licenses, which covered a small number of patents and were generally less valuable.

The report found that, among the PAEs in the study, Litigation PAEs accounted for 96 percent of all patent infringement lawsuits, but generated only about 20 percent of all reported PAE revenues. The report also found that 93 percent of the patent licensing agreements held by Litigation PAEs resulted from litigation, while for Portfolio PAEs that figure was 29 percent.

The separation of portfolio versus litigation business models was an important one - something I discuss in Patent Portfolios as Securities and Lemley & Melamed discuss in Missing the Forest for the Trolls.

The study also debunks the notion of widespread demand letter abuse, but does show that PAEs tend to sue first and demand later. It shows about $4B in revenues for all study respondents over a 6 year period, 80% of which came from portfolio companies (and mostly not after litigation). The study is unclear what this $4B represents if extended to all PAEs, but provides some statistics that might aid in a ball park calculation for the whole market.

There's more -- a lot more -- to this report, which runs 150 pages before the appendices. The study concludes with some reasonable and mostly uncontroversial ways the system can be made better, such as limiting expensive discovery at the early stages of a case. That said, I do take issue with one point of the study - relating to nuisance litigation. More on this after the jump.

A Comprehensive Study of Trade Secret Damages

Elizabeth Rowe (Florida) has shared a draft of "Unpacking Trade Secret Damages" on SSRN. The paper is an ambitious one, examining all of the federal trade secret verdicts she could find (which she believes is a reasonably complete set based on her methods) that issued between 2000 and 2014. The abstract is:

This study is the first to conduct an in-depth empirical analysis of damages in trade secret cases in the U.S. From an original data set of cases in federal courts from 2000 to 2014, I assess the damages awarded on trade secret claims. In addition, a wide range of other variables are incorporated into the analysis, including those related to background court and jurisdiction information, the kinds of trade secrets at issue, background details about the parties, the related causes of action included with claims of trade secret misappropriation, and details about the damages awarded.

Analysis of this data and the relationship between and among the variables yields insightful observations and answers fundamental questions about the patterns and the nature of damages in trade secret misappropriation cases. For instance, I find average trade secret damage awards comparable to those in patent cases and much larger than trademark cases, very positive overall outcomes for plaintiffs, and higher damages on business information than other types of trade secrets. The results make significant contributions in providing deeper context and understanding for trade secret litigation and IP litigation generally, especially now that we enter a new era of trade secret litigation in federal courts under the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016.

I think this study has a lot to offer. Although it doesn't include state court cases, it provides a detailed look at trade secret cases in the first part of this century. Of course, the verdicts, which were about 6% of all trade secret cases filed, are subject to the same selection effects as any other verdict analysis - there is a whole array of cases (more than 2000 of them in the federal system alone) that never made it this far, and we don't know what the tried cases tells us about the shorter-lived cases.

The study offers a lot of details: amounts of awards, states with the highest awards, states with the most litigation, judge v. jury, attorneys' fees, punitive damages, the effect of NDAs on damages, etc. It goes a step further and offers information about the types of information at issue, and even the types of information that garner different sizes of awards. It's really useful information, and I recommend this study to anyone interested in the state of trade secret litigation today.

There are, however, a couple ways I think the information could have been presented differently. First, the study has some percentile information which was great, but most of it focuses on averages. This is a concern because the data is highly skewed; one nearly billion dollar verdict drives much of the relevant totals. Thus, it is difficult to get a real sense for how the verdicts look and there is no standard deviation reported.

Of course, the median award according to the paper is zero, so reporting medians is a problem. I particularly liked the percentile table and discussion, and I wonder whether a 25/50/75 presentation would work. Speaking of zero dollar awards, though, I thought the paper could be improved by clarifying what is calculated in the average. Is it the average of all verdicts? All verdicts where the plaintiff wins? All non-zero verdicts? Related to this, I thought that clearly disaggregating defendant verdicts would be helpful. The paper reports how many plaintiffs won, but this is not reflected in either the median or average award data (that I can tell - only total cases are reported). At one point the paper discusses the average verdict for defendants (more than $800,000) which is confusing since defendants shouldn't win any damages. Are these part of the averages? Are they calculated as a negative value? If these are fee awards, they should be reported separately, I would think.

Though I would like more data resolution, I should note that this really is just a presentation issue. The hard part is done, and the data is clearly available to slice and dice in a variety of ways, and I look forward to further reporting of it.

Two New Studies Challenge Conventional Wisdom on Chinese Patenting

Foreign firms can't get a fair shake in patent litigation in China, and Chinese firms are filing an exceptional number of low-quality patents in the US—right? Not according to two new empirical papers, each of which seeks to debunk one of these pieces of conventional wisdom.

The first, Patent Litigation in China: Protecting Rights or the Local Economy?, is by Brian Love, Christian Helmers, and Markus Eberhardt, and has already been reviewed on Tom Cotter's excellent Comparative Patent Remedies blog. In short, they analyze five years of patent suits in the courts with the 50 most active IP dockets and find that foreign companies win as often as Chinese patentees.

The second, More than BRIC-à-Brac: Testing Chinese Exceptionalism in Patenting Behavior Using Comparative Empirical Analysis, is by Jay Kesan, Alan Marco, and Richard Miller. They study Chinese patenting trends in the USPTO and find that despite claims of Chinese exceptionalism, these trends are "strikingly similar to the patenting trends of other Far East Asian countries whose inventors have applied for patents in the United States. In other words, Chinese innovation is moving up the value chain in product development much like other Far East Asian countries have done in the past. We also find that China appears to be setting itself apart from other BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) countries in successfully seeking patent protection for technological innovation and in producing products with higher levels of technological sophistication and innovation."

Linking PTAB Proceedings to Litigation

We all know about patent litigation. We are learning about PTAB proceedings (Inter Partes Review and Covered Business Methods). But what do we know about both of them? The conventional wisdom is that just about every litigation now has a PTAB proceeding to go along with it. How about strategic PTAB filings untied to litigation?

At the recent WIP/IP conference, I heard no fewer than three people mention Kyle Bass. But not anyone else. And an industry exec at my table commented that there's no evidence Bass made money (or at least would continue to make money) because the market adjusts. So are strategic filings happening, and what do they look like?

Saurabh Vishnubhakat (Texas A&M), Arti Rai (Duke), and Jay Kesan (Illinois) try to get to the bottom of things in a paper forthcoming in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal. Here's the abstract:

The post-grant review proceedings set up at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent and Trial Appeal Board by the America Invents Act of 2011 have transformed the relationship between Article III patent litigation and the administrative state. Not surprisingly, such dramatic change has itself yielded additional litigation possibilities: Cuozzo Speed Technologies v. Lee, a case addressing divergence between the manner in which the PTAB and Article III courts construe patent claims, will soon be argued at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Of the three major new PTAB proceedings, two have proven to be popular as well as controversial: inter partes review and covered business method review. Yet scholarly analysis of litigant behavior in these proceedings has been limited thus far to descriptive data summaries or specific policy perspectives on these types of post-grant challenges, such as their impact on the well-rehearsed patent troll debate. In this article, we present what is to our knowledge the first comprehensive empirical and analytical study of how litigants use these inter partes review and covered business method review proceedings relative to Article III litigation.

A major normative argument for administrative ex post review is that it should be an efficient, accessible, and accurate substitute for Article III litigation over patent validity. We assess the substitution hypothesis, using individual patents as our general unit of analysis as well as investigating patent-petitioner pairs and similar details in greater depth. Our data indicate that the “standard model” of explicit substitution — wherein a district court defendant subsequently brings an administrative challenge to patent validity — occurs for the majority (70%) of petitioners who bring inter partes review challenges. An important implication of this effect is that the PTAB should use a claim construction standard that mirrors that of the district court, so that substituting administrative process for judicial process does not lead to substantively different outcomes.

Notably, however, standard substitution is not the only use of the PTAB: particularly in the area of inter partes reviews, we also see a surprising percentage of cases (about 30%) where the petitioner is not the target of a prior suit on the same patent. The frequency of these nonstandard petitioners, as well as their tendency to join the same petitions as an entity that has been sued, varies by technology. Our data on nonstandard petitioners provide some insight into the extent to which patent challengers are engaging in collective action to contest the validity of patents. Depending on the details of how nonstandard petitioning and collective action are being deployed, this activity could provide a social benefit or constitute a form of harassment.

 I hardly need a blog post after that! But I do have a couple comments. First, the authors do a good job of discussing the literature on whether the substitutive effect is efficient or harassing. Second, and related, there is some good data here on whether motions for stays are being granted in litigation (about half the time, or more depending on interpretation). Third, the "strategic" filing data is interesting, because some is not so strategic (litigation is "in the offing" as they authors note) but some comes out of nowhere.

In general, this is an interesting and helpful look at the new proceedings and a must read for someone who wants to understand the current litigation environment.

How Does the Economy Affect Patent Litigation?

When I was in practice, the conventional wisdom was that litigation (of all kinds) grew during recessions, because people were less optimistic and willing to let slights go, and instead fought over every dollar. Alan Marco (Chief Economist, PTO), Shawn Miller (Stanford Law Fellow), and Ted Sichelman (San Diego) have attempted to tackle this question with respect to patent litigation. They examine litigation rates from 1970-2009 in conjunction with a variety of macroeconomic factors.

Their paper is coming out in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, but a draft is on SSRN. The abstract follows:

Recent studies estimate that the economic impact of U.S. patent litigation may be as large as $80 billion per year and that the overall rate of U.S. patent litigation has been growing rapidly over the past twenty years. And yet, the relationship of the macroeconomy to patent litigation rates has never been studied in any rigorous fashion. This lacuna is notable given that there are two opposing theories among lawyers regarding the effect of economic downturns on patent litigation. One camp argues for a substitution theory, holding that patent litigation should increase in a downturn because potential plaintiffs have a greater incentive to exploit patent assets relative to other investments. The other camp posits a capital constraint theory that holds that the decrease in cash flow and available capital disincentivizes litigation. Analyzing quarterly patent infringement suit filing data from 1971-2009 using a time-series vector autoregression (VAR) model, we show that economic downturns have significantly affected patent litigation rates. (To aid other researchers in testing and extending our analyses, we have made our entire dataset available online.) Importantly, we find that these effects have changed over time. In particular, patent litigation has become more dependent on credit availability in a downturn. We hypothesize that such changes resulted from an increase in use of contingent-fee attorneys by patent plaintiffs and the rise of non-practicing entities (NPEs), which unlike most operating companies, generally fund their lawsuits directly from outside capital sources. Over roughly the last twenty years, we find that macroeconomic conditions have affected patent litigation in contrasting ways. Decreases in GDP (particularly economy-wide investment) are correlated with significant increases in patent litigation and countercyclical economic trends. On the other hand, increases in T-bill and real interest rates as well as increases in economy-wide financial risk are generally correlated with significant decreases in patent suits, leading to procyclical trends. Thus, the specific nature of a downturn predicts whether patent litigation rates will tend to rise or fall.

The authors also have a guest post at Patently-O discussing their findings.

I don't have too much to add to their analysis; the notion that a credit crunch will reduce litigation makes a lot of sense.

My two primary additional comments are as follows:

1. There is a lot more to the findings and the authors' analysis than presented in the Patently-O post. For example, there was a shift as litigation changed from competitor to licensor-based claims. The full paper is worth a read.

2. I am not fully convinced what this tells us about the period from 2010-2014. The authors hint that economic growth during that time correlates with a drop in litigation, but the drop in litigation was only in latter 2014 (and reversed itself in early 2015, as they note). This is further complicated by the change in how we count litigation after the America Invents Act requirement that each defendant be joined in a separate case. I think a lot more work (and creative thought) needs to be done to meld the pre- and post-AIA data into a coherent data set.

[UPDATE: I've been corrected - patent litigation by defendant count apparently decreased more than I let on (see, e.g. here) if you exclude false marking claims. This tempers some of my skepticism, though I would still like to see the post AIA data combined with pre-AIA data]

Fee Shifting and Veil Piercing

One of the discussion points about the new PATENT Act reform proposal making the rounds is the "reach through" that pierces the corporate veil for those entities that must pay attorneys' fees. Like so many of these fee shifting proposals, I'm left scratching my head and wondering whether this is where we want to make our stand, heading down the slippery slope of corporate veil piercing. I can think of so many other worthy plaintiffs and defendants where I would rather pierce the veil, and yet we don't.

I don't want to minimize the concern. The protection offered limited liability companies is a real problem for those who want to collect against them. I've known this since I was shocked to read Walkovszky v. Carlton in corporations law. The defendant owned 20 taxicabs in 10 corporations, but the court allowed liability only against the one corporation that owned the cab that ran over the plaintiff. While it seems ridiculous to allow corporations to avoid liability this way, this is a deeply engrained rule of law in this country. In any event, I haven't seen any real data about how often fee awards go unpaid, so I don't know just how much of a problem this really is. I suppose it will become a more common problem if there is more fee shifting.

Make no mistake, though, the PATENT Act and all other veil-piercing fee proposals are not about under-capitalized shell companies - not at a deeper level. These proposals stand for the proposition that we hate patent enforcement by non-practicing entities so much that we're just going to throw out all the rules that apply to everyone else, no matter how bad an actor all those other people are. Only patent plaintiffs are so despicable that they are no longer entitled to corporate status.  And this is not just about patent acquisition companies - this covers inventor operated companies, research companies and think tanks, failed startups, and anyone else who doesn't make a product.

I should note here that I'm not wholly opposed to fee shifting. I think there can be some benefit to reciprocal fee shifting, and I also think that the "objectively unreasonable" standard is better than a presumption. I should also note that this is not a plaintiff only issue. Only a few short years ago, record companies sued a venture capital firm for investing in copyright defendant Napster, a company that had, at best, a crapshoot of winning its case. That investor suit was also unwarranted for the same reasons that this proposal is: targeted veil piercing to support substantive policy goals is not a great idea -- the bell tolls for thee.

After the jump is my nitty-gritty analysis of the fee-shifting and veil-piercing proposal, and discussion about why I think it's a problem.

Long Term Trends in IP Litigation

Matthew Sag has posted IP Litigation in United States District Courts: 1994 to 2014 (forthcoming Iowa L. Rev.) on SSRN. The article takes a thirty year look at IP litigation in the district courts:

This article undertakes a broad-based empirical review of Intellectual Property (IP) litigation in United States federal district courts from 1994 to 2014. Unlike the prior literature, this study analyzes federal copyright, patent and trademark litigation trends as a unified whole. It undertakes a systematic analysis of more than 190,000 individual case filings and examines the subject matter, geographical and temporal variation within federal IP litigation over the last two decades.

This article makes a number of significant contributions to our understanding of IP litigation. It analyzes time trends in copyright, patent and trademark litigation filings at the national level, but it does much more than simply count the number of cases; it explores the meaning behind those numbers and shows how in some cases the observable headline data can be positively misleading. Exploring the changes in the distribution of IP litigation over time and their regional distribution leads to a number of significant insights, these are summarized below. Just as importantly, one of the key contributions of this article is that it frames the context for more fine-grained empirical studies in the future. Many of the results and conclusions herein demonstrate the dangers of basing empirical conclusions on narrow slices of data from selected regions or selected time periods.

Some of the key findings of this study are as follows:
First, the rise of Internet file-sharing has transformed copyright litigation in the United States. More specifically, to the extent that the rate of copyright litigation has increased over the last two decades, that increase appears to be entirely attributable to lawsuits against anonymous Internet file sharers. These lawsuits largely took place in two distinct phases: the first phase largely consisted of lawsuits seeking to discourage illegal downloading; the second phase largely consists lawsuits seeking to monetize online infringement.

Second, in relation to patent litigation, the apparent patent litigation explosion between 2010 and 2012 is something of a mirage; however there has been a sustained patent litigation inflation over the last two decades the extent of which has not been fully recognized until now. The reason why this steady inflation was mistaken for a sudden explosion was that the true extent of patent litigation was disguised by permissive joinder.

Third, in relation to the geography of IP litigation, it appears that filings in copyright, patent and trademark litigation are generally highly correlated. The major exceptions to that correlation are driven by short term idiosyncratic events in copyright and trademark litigation — these are discussed in detail — and by the dumbfounding willingness of the Eastern district Texas to engage in forum selling to attract patent litigation. The popularity of the Eastern District of Texas as a forum for patent litigation is a well-known phenomenon. However, the data and analysis presented in this study provides a new way of looking at the astonishing ascendancy of this district and the problem of form shopping in patent law more generally.

It's a well-developed abstract, so I don't have a lot to add on the coverage. I do have a few thoughts after the jump.

Yelderman on Coordination-Focused Patent Policy

If the main benefit of patents is their role in coordination—facilitating transactions in information and thereby increasing collaboration—would we want patent law to look any different? This is the question tackled by Steve Yelderman (Notre Dame Law School) in his working paper Coordination-Focused Patent Policy, which I recently had the pleasure to read.

As Yelderman notes, there is currently much debate among patent scholars on what the best utilitarian justification for the patent system is (as well as whether utilitarianism is even the right foundation). Historically, patents have been seen primarily as ways to incentivize innovators with monetary rewards, though there is disagreement over whether the reward is for ex ante or ex post behavior. But commentators have increasingly argued that the patent system also (or primarily) plays a key role in coordinating communities of innovators; see, e.g., work by Paul Heald, Scott Kieff, Oskar Liivak, Clarisa Long, Rob Merges, and Jason Rantanen. Different scholars emphasize different coordinating functions, but Yelderman notes a unifying theme in this line of work: "reducing costs and risks so that otherwise privately desirable transactions can occur."

In Coordination-Focused Patent Policy, Yelderman does not take sides in this debate over the role of coordination in justifying the patent system. Rather, he is interested in what coordination-focused policy would even look like—a question that is important even if coordination is merely a subsidiary benefit of patents—and he concludes that it would look rather different from a rewards-focused system.

Final CELS Recap: Trolls, Anticommons, M&A

I have already posted on the papers from the Intellectual Property I session at the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) by Aghion et al., Abrams et al., and Frakes & Wasserman. There were three more papers selected for the Intellectual Property II session on the second day of CELS, which I'll briefly describe here:

Ford on Invalidity vs. Noninfringement

I'm in NYC for the IP Scholars Conference (IPSC) at Cardozo Law, and one of the (many) article presentations I'm really looking forward to is Patent Invalidity Versus Noninfringement (forthcoming in the Cornell Law Review), by Roger Ford (Bigelow Fellow at Chicago, @rford). Ford argues that patent defendants are more likely to argue noninfringement than invalidity, and that this imbalance exacerbates the problem of bad patents. This article is well worth a look, both because it is a fun read (peppered with examples from actual patents) and, more importantly, because the basic insight seems right.

Patent Costs & Benefits

Do the costs of U.S. patents exceed their benefits for publicly traded firms? This is the claim of John Turner, James Bessen, Peter Neuhäusler, and Jonathan Williams in their newly posted working paper, The Costs and Benefits of United States Patents. Bessen's prior work has very strong supporters and detractors, and I suspect the response to this paper will be similarly polarized. But I think it is worth understanding precisely what this paper is attempting to measure—and why, even if Turner et al. are correct that the costs they measure exceed the benefits they measure, this does not imply that we should scrap the patent system (though it may be cause for concern).