For decades, academics have argued that the US system for regulating the practice of law inhibits innovation. Despite that academic consensus, we live in an age of unparalleled innovation in the way legal services are provided to clients in the United States. What gives? How can we live in a […]
In this paper we test general theoretical predictions for litigation and the failure of settlement. Asymmetric stake sizes and asymmetric information are the main theoretical explanations for litigation to occur. These are especially prevalent in patent litigation cases.
In his influential paper “Contracting Into Liability Rules: Intellectual Property Rights and Collective Rights Organizations,” Rob Merges makes the case that intellectual property (IP) owners vested with property entitlements can and do contract away their right to an injunction when it is efficient for them to do so. The result […]
There is no global patent that will secure protection for an invention globally, and as the title of the book Global Patents: Limits of Transnational Enforcement (Oxford University Press, 2012) suggests, holders of national patents have a limited ability to enforce their patents across national borders. While national patent systems […]
Medical Malpractice reform limits a victim’s ability to recover for their losses in medical accidents. Indeed, the literature has established that the number of claims in states with tort reform has gone down. How do personal injury (PI) plaintiff lawyers deal with the decrease in the demand for their services?
There […]
Willful patent infringement is a critical issue in patent litigation, as it can result in an award of up to treble (enhanced) damages. In a 2007 decision, In re Seagate, the Federal Circuit significantly altered the standard governing willful infringement by requiring the patentee to prove at least “objective recklessness” […]
The patent world is quietly undergoing a change of seismic proportions. In a few short years, a handful of entities have amassed vast treasuries of patents on an unprecedented scale. To give some sense of the magnitude of this change, our research shows that in a little more than five […]
Forum shopping is widespread in patent litigation because there are clear differences in outcomes among the various federal districts. An accused patent infringer that is sued in a particularly disadvantageous forum can file a motion to transfer to a more convenient forum, but the general consensus is that such motions […]
The decision was made to purely concentrate on the mobile technology field. According to Lex Machina (as cited in “Study: mobile patent lawsuits up 25% a year since 2006”, 2011), an intellectual property litigation company, mobile devices related lawsuits are growing up 25% yearly since 2006.
A long legacy of empirical research suggests that patents are more important for stimulating research in pharmaceuticals than in any other industry (Levin et al. 1987;Cohen et al. 2000). Patents on new drug compounds are difficult to invent around, and thus are effective in preventing imitation. At the same time, […]