Patent Assertion Entity Activity

during the study period. This included all jurisdictions and docket numbers associated with all patent
lawsuits; the plaintiffs, the defendants, and all patents named in the lawsuit; the resolution of the lawsuit;
and whether the lawsuit involved wireless patents.
Using this information, the FTC measured: the number of cases initiated by Study PAEs, the number of
Affiliates identified as plaintiffs, the technology categories to which the litigated patents corresponded,
the number of patents asserted in litigation, the defendants’ primary industry, the fraction of cases that
settled, the duration of settled cases, the choice of jurisdiction by the plaintiff, the actions taken by a
court on the case, and the use of contingency fee counsel. The Commission also measured the frequency
with which a unique defendant was sued by any Study PAE and, if sued multiple times by the same
Responding PAE, whether any of the suits were brought by multiple Affiliates.
For purposes of this study, the FTC defined a patent case as dispute between a plaintiff and defendant on
a set of patents, where a set may comprise just one patent. Thus, under this definition, a single litigation
(defined by a docket number) that lists multiple defendants counts as multiple cases. On the other hand,
litigation between a plaintiff and defendant related to the same patent or patents counts as a single case
even if multiple dockets were associated with that case (such as inter-district transfers). 208 Using this
definition, the FTC identified 3,895 cases that were initiated in U.S. district court by 256 unique
plaintiffs against 1,956 unique defendants between January 1, 2009 and September 15, 2014. 209
208
See Ball & Kesan, supra note 95 (adopting a similar approach to the FTC’s methodology); see also Jay P. Kesan &
Gwendolyn G. Ball, How Are Patent Cases Resolved? An Empirical Examination of the Adjudication and Settlement of
Patent Disputes, 84 WASH. U. L. REV. 237 (2006). The FTC’s study period spans the implementation of the America Invents
Act (AIA), which limited the circumstances in which multiple defendants can be joined in one action. Leahy–Smith America
Invents Act, Pub. L. No. 112-29, § 19(d)(1), 125 Stat. 284, 332 (2011) (codified at 35 U.S.C. § 299). Separating litigations
that have multiple defendants into separate cases resolves the issues associated with comparisons of litigation before and after
the AIA’s implementation.
209
In the submitted data, Responding PAEs sometimes reported multiple patent infringement lawsuits (with different docket
numbers) corresponding to litigation brought by a Responding PAE (or its Affiliate) against a single defendant where each
litigation referenced identical patents. The most common cause of these multiple lawsuits corresponding to a single dispute
was when a court either consolidated a number of related lawsuits or transferred a lawsuit to another district court. In
addition, in some instances a plaintiff added or subtracted patents from the set of patents identified in the original complaint,
sometimes by filing additional complaints and receiving additional docket numbers. In this study, we treated the multiple
records corresponding to what was, in essence, a single patent infringement dispute by capturing the relevant information
describing the patent dispute from the multiple docket entries contained in the submitted data and reducing the multiple
dockets to a single case observation. Thus, our analysis determined that the 2,452 lawsuits (unique docket numbers) reported
by the Responding PAEs corresponded to the 3,895 patent cases analyzed in this section of the report. See also Appendix B:
Methodology (providing a detailed explanation of how the case observation was created).
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