Lex Machina will be releasing it’s 2015 Year End IP Trends Report tomorrow and it will be posted on their website  on January 7th. Lex Machina is one of the pioneers,  if not “the pioneer” in bringing
custom intellectual property litigation analytics into legal practice workflow.  Periodically Lex Machina does all the heavy lifting and generates special reports examining intellectual property litigation trends. Their most recent report summarizes patent copyright and trademark litigation in 2015.

I received a preview of the year end report from Brian Howard, Lex Machina’s Legal Data Scientist and Director of Analytics.

Here are some key trends:

Patent

  • Patent litigation in US District Courts rose 15% in 2015.
  • Filings rose 43% from the 3rd to 4th quarter of 2015.
  • 43% of all patent cases are filed in Eastern District of Texas


Copyright

  • In the copyright area file sharing cases declined and more traditional copying cases were relatively flat and within a recent trend of 500-600 cases per quarter.

Trademark

  •  2015 saw the lowest rate of trademark litigation cases filed in 10 years.( Which I find surprising — Mark Zuckerberg wants to own “face”  and Taylor Swift just tried to trademark “1989”  — and trademark litigation is slowing?)