Pendency of Patent Infringement Litigation

By Dennis Crouch

I looked at patent litigation complaint filings over the past few years to work on identifying the timing of typical lawsuits. The chart below shows the percentage of lawsuits that are still open (i.e., not terminated) grouped by the complaint filing year. As the chart shows, 99% of the patent lawsuits filed back in 2005 & 2006 have been terminated at the district court level (I should note here that some of these may still be on appeal and thus “live” in that sense.). On the other hand, 99% of the patent lawsuits filed in the past 50 days (2014 calendar year) are still open. For the most part, there simply has not been time to even settle those cases. Important results: more than one third of the lawsuits are terminated within one year and about three quarters are done within two years. I generated the data from a LexMachina search and the results based on cases still open as of February 17, 2014.