The dataset contains the details of Patent Litigation Cases in the United States from 2000 to 2021. The team collected the litigation data in two phases. The first phase looked at data from 2010, specifically within Texas's Western and Eastern Districts. Unified Patent's Portal includes litigation data that each plaintiff has been marked as NPE (Patent Assertion Entity), NPE (Small Company), or NPE (Individual).
Using the definitions, Unified first focused on identifying what NPEs were aggregators and then if they involved third-party financing. NPE aggregators were defined as NPEs with more than one affiliated subsidiary bringing patent litigation. An example of this would be IP Edge and the various limited liability companies underneath IP Edge's control that have brought numerous litigations against operating companies. Third-party financing was defined as evidence of any third party with a financial interest other than the assertors.
With a narrow focus on the Western and Eastern District of Texas, Unified then used several public databases, such as Edgar, USPTO Assignment Records, the NPE Stanford Database, press releases, and its database of NPEs to identify any aggregator and any third-party financial interest, as well as various secretary of state corporate filings or court-ordered disclosures. After these two districts were identified, Unified expanded the data to cover the top five most litigious venues for patents, including the Western and Eastern Districts of Texas, Delaware, and the North and Central Districts of California. (On average, over the past five years, these districts have seen about 70% of all patent litigation.) Once that was completed, that dataset was then expanded to include all jurisdictions from 2010 and on.
The final step was to complete the data set from 2000 to 2009. The team followed a similar data collection process using Lex Machina, the NPE Stanford Database, and Unified's Portal. Unified identified all of the litigation known to be NPE-related. Using the top five jurisdictions' aggregation and financing data, aggregator entities—such as Intellectual Ventures—were identified using the same methodology. The current dataset covers 2000-2021, determines who is an NPE, notes which NPEs are aggregators, and identifies which aggregators are known to have third-party financing.
Note: there are currently no reporting requirements Federally, at the state level, or in the courts to publicly disclose the financing details of nonpublic entities. Thus, any data analysis of which litigations are funded or financed is incomplete, as many of these arrangements are closely held, private, and unknown even to the courts and the parties to the actions. This data set describes the minimum known amount of third-party-funded patent litigation. It is necessarily underinclusive of all nonpublic deals for which there is no available evidence or insight. For further generalized industry information on the size and scope of litigation funding for patent litigations, private sources often report on the size and scope of the burgeoning industry in the aggregate. For example, see Westfleet Advisor's 2021 Litigation Finance Report, available at https://www.westfleetadvisors.com/publications/2021-litigation-finance-report/.