Stanford CIS

The Long Tail of Patent Litigation

By Stuart Soffer on

Motivated by the talk of a few weeks ago, I looked at the patent litigation data in my IP Litigation database to see whether the duration of litigation conformed to a ‘long tail’ pattern.  The attached chart shows the number of cases that close the indicated months after filing. Of 27,710 cases where both filing and closing dates are available, almost 38% conclude (for whatever reason) within 6 months.