Patexia Insight 35: IPR Market Leaders (Top Firms)
Since its inception in September 2012, Inter-Partes Review (IPR) has emerged as a powerful tool to challenge the validity of patents in lawsuits. We have closely monitored this from the viewpoint of companies, law firms, judges, attorneys, patents, claims, etc. This week, we have turned our attention towards law firms, with a goal of identifying the top firms representing petitioners or patent owners in IPR cases. Our research showed that Sterne Kessler, named on total of 473 IPR cases from 2012 to 2016, ranked as the most active firm representing both sides (patent owners and petitioners).
Following Sterne Kessler in the rankings are Fish & Richardson (421 cases), Finnegan (375 cases), WilmerHale (250 cases) and Oblon Spivak (244 cases).
We further divided and analyzed the data from two other angles: The top firms representing petitioners and the top firms representing patent owners. We found Fish & Richardson and Sterne Kessler ranked first on the petitioners side and patent owners side, respectively. However, the mix of other firms was relatively different with some overlaps.
On the petitioners side, we found 565 unique law firms, named on 5,592 petitions, who filed their cases from 2012 through 2016 before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). The top five law firms filed 1,050, or almost 20 percent, of all petitions.
Fish & Richardson ranked first with 272 petitions, well ahead of the rest. The numbers for the next three were very similar: Finnegan ranked second with 202 cases, WilmerHale ranked third with 201 cases and Sterne Kessler ranked fourth with 199 cases. Sidley Austin with 176 cases was ranked fifth.
On the patent owners side, the results were even more interesting. We found a total of 721 unique law firms representing patent owners, 22 percent more than total number of firms representing petitioners. This list included a lot of small law firms and solo practitioners. Often times, the patent owners are unable financially to hire the same type of firms petitioners hire, as petitioners often are large companies. Interestingly, the list of the top five firms included two such firms.
The top three ranked firms on the patent owners side were also among the top five on the petitioners side. Sterne Kessler ranked first with 274, followed by Finnegan with 173 cases and Fish & Richardson with 149 cases. Ranking fourth with 138 cases was Law Offices of Dr. Gregory Gonsalves, which is a small firm that mainly represented Zond as the patent owner in many of its cases against big companies. We reported this a while ago ago (Patexia Insight 32: Not a Single Claim Survived after 125 IPR Challenges). Ranking fifth is Ascenda Law Group, which is another fairly small firm that has represented patent owners such as Zond, Clouding IP, Vringo, etc.
We have seen a steady increase in IPR filings since its inception. 2012 began with a modest count of 96 filings (all late in the year from September through the end of December). This grew several times to 702 filings in 2013. 2014 also recorded a strong year-over-year (YoY) growth rate of 113 percent to 1,501 cases. Subsequently in 2015, the IPR filing count reached a plateau with 1,655 filings.
2016 saw a small dip downward to 1,638 filings, but it still marked the third year in a row of at least 1,500 filings. We believe this overall trend is going to continue in 2017. The first 5 months of the year have seen 794 filings, which is higher than prior years.
The following pie chart shows the current case-level status (as of May 31, 2017) of the 5,592 cases that have been filed through the end of 2016..
In the following weeks, we will continue this analysis and look at the top performers of 2016 only. We will evaluate the growth rate for different firms and identify the top performers in terms of YoY growth, as some firms have rapidly gained market share in this growing PTAB market. We also plan to review the attorneys / law firms and analyze their performance by looking at the outcome of the cases assigned to them at both the case and claim levels.
Special thanks to our Data Analysis Group, in particular, Abhinaya Rajaram, for investigating and analyzing the PTAB data.
Note: If you have specific needs, contact us as we can provide IPR Intelligence Reports, customized for your organization. We help companies and law firms make a more informed decision by providing analysis of the IPR landscape and the major players in the field.