Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Lex Machina 2019 Patent Litigation Year in Review

As I noted the other day in my post on injunctions, Lex Machina recently published its Patent Litigation Report 2019.  In addition to compiling statistics on permanent and preliminary injunctions--and showing a decline in both federal district court and PTAB case filings in 2018--the report also includes some interesting statistics on damages.  In particular, the report states that "Even though 2018 saw around the same quantity of cases awarding damages as in the previous five years"--56 in 2018, compared with 57 in 2017--"there was a much greater total amount of damages awarded, the highest since 2014. The large increase in damages from the previous years is attributable to large jury awards of reasonable royalty damages. Particularly, in Virtnex Inc. v. Apple the jury awarded plaintiff over $500 million in damages and in Kaist IP v. Samsung the jury awarded $400 million in damages."  The report further breaks down damages awards into reasonable royalties (accounting for 38 cases), lost profits, enhanced damages, and other categories.  Readers who have access to Lex Machina should definitively request a copy.

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