Stanford Is Serving 11 Flavors of NPE

It's been seven years in the making. In May, Stanford Law School made available to the public a database of every patent lawsuit that's been filed since 2007. Under the guidance of Stanford's Shawn Miller and Mark Lemley, student researchers have categorized and tracked 43,000 suits by the type of plaintiff that filed them — whether a practicing entity, or one of 11 different types of NPEs.

The Stanford NPE Litigation Database allows researchers to track outcomes by, for example, whether a plaintiff was an individual inventor, a failed startup, a university, a company that acquires patents as its business, an IP subsidiary of a product company, an industry consortium, and several other categories.

Lemley is already making use of the data in a forthcoming article that compares how practicing and non-practicing entities have fared when asserting standard-essential patents in court. (His finding: “NPEs do much worse in court, even when they assert SEPs.”)

Sidley Austin partner Vernon Winters said he could imagine a number of ways the data will be useful: In-house lawyers who are exposed to patent suits sporadically and are trying to calibrate risk. Sophisticated players trying to focus their amicus activities for maximum impact. He expects to use it himself as a volunteer on the Northern District of California's neutral panel, to demonstrate actual outcomes “with these types of patents in this district. Here's where cases like this usually end up.”

— Scott Graham, Skilled in the Art, Law.com