Patexia Insight 15: Top 25 Defendant-Side Law Firms

Couple of weeks ago, our Data Science Team released Patexia Ranking Engine for the first time by ranking the Top 25 Plaintiff-Side Law Firms based on the data for 2015 district court filing activities. The list included a mix of relatively small and large firms that had represented patent owners with many cases filed against large corporations. This week, we have updated Patexia Ranking Engine to also cover the top 25 defendant-side law firms.

Using the same ranking methodology as the Top 25 Plaintiff-Side Law Firm list, we focused on two separate factors: number of cases filed in district courts, based on 2015 PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) data; and number of unique patents involved in those cases. We learned that the top 25 law firms on the list represented defendants in less than 16 percent of all patent suits in 2015, with the top results including many large multinational law firms representing large corporate defendants.

Similar to plaintiff-side law firms, in order to identify the most active firms on the defendant-side, we decided to look beyond just a simple metric of number of cases. This is because oftentimes, and especially following the enactment of the America Invents Act (AIA), law firms may represent several companies in multiple cases filed by a single plaintiff. To improve the model, we also included the number of unique patents litigated by each firm. Then we calculated a normalized score for each firm by taking into account both variables: number of cases and number of unique patents.

The Beta version of Patexia Ranking Engine has been released and rankings are available for all the firms that have been named as the defendant firm for at least one case in 2015.

The following list summarizes the top 25 law firms representing defendants in patent suits based on cases filed in 2015. Only four law firms made it to both top 25 defendant and plaintiff-side lists: Fish and Richardson, Finnegan, Quinn Emanuel and Perkins Coie.

 

Top 25 Defendant-Side Law Firms

 

Unlike the Top 25 Plaintiff-Side Law Firms that was a mix of small and large law firms, this list only consists of large law firms. This makes sense, since in most patent suits, defendants are large corporations and can afford to retain large law firms.

The Patexia Ranking Engine now covers more than 6000 law firms in the US. We analyzed 6,364 patent suits filed in 2015, identifying from court dockets more than 6,000 unique law firms representing either defendants or plaintiffs. Then we grouped the defendants’ firms, cleaned up and normalized the names to find those with the most cases. Within each group of cases belonging to each firm, we calculated the number of unique patents involved.

The ranking for all firms (beyond the top 25) are available but currently only visible to attorneys and staff of each firm if they log in using their firm’s email address.

In the coming weeks, we plan to expand this ranking to include prosecution data (number of filings, time from filing to issuance, number of office actions, etc.), PTAB cases (number of cases, outcome of the case, etc.), number of patent practitioners and many more metrics.  We also hope to update the data more often. Currently, the Patexia Ranking Engine is updated quarterly, but we plan to increase the frequency to weekly.