Summary: Professor Mark Lemley's Lex Machina highlights litigation trends by collecting and analysing data related to patents and pertaining to intellectual monopolies in general; now it shows litigation droughts

"Lex Machina’s Hatch-Waxman/ANDA [Abbreviated New Drug Application] Report reveals a spike in case filing," MIP wrote the other day, "as well as the biggest participants and law firms in ANDA patent litigation" (with low quality of patents, more lawsuits are assured).

We find it interesting that MIP chose to focus only on ANDA (one single aspect among many) because the figures from Lex Machina don't show a spike in litigation overall. Selection bias? Cherry-picking perhaps, as any lawyer's means/method for constructing misleading (but nonetheless not false) statements? As a patent maximalism site has just put it, "IP litigation report shows downward trends in patent" and to quote the author (not the overzealous supporter of software patents): "Intellectual property litigation analytics firm Lex Machina has recently released a report identifying trends in IP litigation which have played out over the course of the first quarter of 2016. The first quarter saw some interesting developments in regards to decreases in certain types of litigation throughout the IP world. In fact, it could be argued that the number of IP cases filed were trending downward across the board during 2016’s first quarter.

"Even if the patent office continues to ignore the reality post Alice, courts certainly do not.""Regular patent litigation reports released by Lex Machina in recent months have given us some insight into patterns forming over the past few years. An early January post on litigation trends during 2015 reflected steep increases in patent litigation and the dominance of certain U.S. district courts in receiving those cases. A larger 2015 patent litigation report published by Lex Machina in March showed us the top litigants and asserted patents during the course of that year."

As we are going to show in later posts, software patents continue to die in the US, no matter what the lobbyists are trying to achieve. Even if the patent office continues to ignore the reality post Alice, courts certainly do not. The patent office is in general incentivised to grant more and more patents, whereas courts produce judgments based on law. ⬆