Patent filing statistics

 

PATracer has its September 2008 On the Radar report out, which tracks trends in the filing of patent cases.  200 new cases out, down from 241 in August.  ED Tex is still tops at 29, with #2 and #3 New Jersey and ND Cal with 16 and 11 respectively.
As readers may recall, TrollTracker used to slice this data different ways, including by number of defendants sued, on the assumption that number of defendants was a better indicator of the relative sizes of districts.  I'd suggest that another way this could be viewed is by number of plaintiffs, i.e. has a single plaintiff sued a number of defendants, but in separate cases.  So where PTT would assign greater weight to a district if a few cases with a lot of defendants were filed, it might also be reasonable to asign less weight of a piece of litigation was broken up into separate filings.  My assumption would be that the two would roughtly balance out eventually, but for those working the numbers, that's just something you might take into consideration.

Patently-O also has some recent patent filing statistics for review, courtesy of Prof. Paul Janicke at ther University of Houston in Houston (which is not currently in the Eastern District, although it does depend on who you ask).  Consistent with what Kyle is reporting, while Prof. Janicke's research seees filing for a the year at slightly above last year's level, there is a significant dropoff in the past couple of months, which he speculates might have something to do with the larger economy (that or lawyers too busy working on the election to file cases). For example, Eastern District filings for September and October were 55 - down from 68 last year and even slightly lower than the 55 in 2006.

Of course all of this is not a lot more than a snapshot based on a couple of months, but it's interesting nonetheless to see where things may be headed.