Last week, we released the names of the five most active companies in IPR. However, the most active ones are not necessarily the best performing. This week, we have reviewed all entities that have been involved in IPR through the end of the second quarter of 2017 and ranked them based on their performance. Based on our review, GlobalFoundries, the semiconductor company that has filed 23 IPR petitions, ranked first with a performance of 100 percent, followed by Gillette, EMC, Finjan, and Volkswagen.

For calculating the IPR performance, we only considered those entities that have been involved in at least 20 or more cases as a petitioner or patent owner. This limitation was necessary, as a difference exists between a company with a single IPR and a company like Apple with 300 or more cases.

We also had to define what we mean by best performing entities. To calculate the performance, we looked at the outcome of the case and the status. We only considered non-pending cases with one of the following statuses: Terminated-Denied, Terminated-Settled, Instituted, and Final Written Decision Entered (FWD Entered). The following table summarizes what we assumed for petitioner or patent owner in each case:

Status	Winner
Terminated-Denied	Patent Owner
Terminated-Settled	Petitioner
Instituted	Petitioner
FWD Entered - All Valid	Patent Owner
FWD Entered - Some Invalid	Petitioner

If the case had received the Final Written Decision, we looked at the outcome to see whether all claims were validated. If a single claim was invalidated, we assumed the petitioner was successful; otherwise, we assumed the patent owner was successful. The performance was measured as a ratio of total wins over all non-pending cases. The wins have been shown in green and the remaining cases are in grey in the figure. The percentage above each company shows its performance.

Four out of the five best performing companies were operating companies and appeared mostly as petitioners. However, Finjan is a non-practicing entity (NPE) and in 37 out of 40 cases was a patent owner. Knowing that it is much harder to win as a patent owner, Finjan has done a very good job so far, which makes its patents even more valuable. Based on our success table listed above, it only takes a single claim to lose a case as a patent owner. Besides if the case is settled, we still assume the patent owner has lost. The reason for that is often times IPR is the result of the pending District Court lawsuit and if it is settled, most likely the patent owner has not seen the ROI to continue the litigation.

On the petitioner side, we only considered the cases where the entity had filed the petition, and we only reviewed entities with at least 10 cases or more as a petitioner. GlobalFoundries was again ranked first with a performance of 100 percent (on 23 of 23 cases) followed by ACTIFIO (12 of 12), K/S HIMPP (11 of 11), Nintendo (10 of 10), and Gillette (26 of 27).

On the patent owner side, again we limited the study to those entities that have been involved in at least 10 IPR challenges as a patent owner. We found that Mobilstar Technologies and Solocron Media were ranked first with a performance of 100 percent, followed by Onyx Therapeutics (9 of 10), Vivint (13 of 15), and Finjan (32 of 37).

To construct our data for this study, we reviewed the entity names and tried to find the parent companies for each petitioner or patent owner. Some companies, such as Marathon or Acacia Research Group, form a separate entity for each portfolio. So while it is possible that some of their entities had a very good performance, the overall performance was lower for all controlled entities.

For Further Reading
Last week, we released our first comprehensive IPR Intelligence Report under our Patexia Insights arm, and it’s available for download now. This is the first installment of a bi-annual report that investigates IPR challenges from many angles, including the top 50 petitioners and patent owners in terms of activity and performance. We have calculated the performance of many entities active in IPR including Unified Patents, RPX, and many NPEs. Also included is a ranking of law firms and attorneys representing these entities in order to help both parties involved in IPR better understand this growing market and to make informed choices about their service providers.

In the following weeks, we will share our analysis of the most active and top performing law firms representing petitioners and patent owners.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.