This week, the Patexia Data Science Team identified the most active law firms representing plaintiffs in patent suits.

Our rankings considered two independent factors: number of cases filed in district courts, based on 2015 PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) data; and number of unique patents involved in those cases. The top results were a mix of well-known international firms plus a number of small boutique firms with many cases filed on a handful of patents. We learned that the top 25 law firms on the list represented plaintiffs in about 30 percent of all patent suits in 2015.

Given that our goal was to identify the firms managing the most cases involving many unique patents, for this analysis we decided to include number of litigated patents. Doing so helped us avoid selecting only firms filing many cases concerning only one or two patents. This is pertinent because under the America Invents Act (AIA), a plaintiff can only sue a limited number of defendants in a single case, and in 2015, there were many cases filed by one entity with a single counsel involving only a handful of patents.

We analyzed 6,364 patent suits filed in 2015, identifying from court dockets more than 6,000 unique law firms representing either defendants or plaintiffs. Then we grouped the plaintiffs’ firms to find those with the most cases. Within each group of cases belonging to each firm, we calculated the number of unique patents involved.

The remaining complexity was that some firms named on the docket only acted as a local counsel and not the lead counsel. This is especially true for firms based in one of the top states for patent litigation, such as Texas or Delaware. The lead counsel, located in another state, manages the case through the local counsel located in one of those states. To compensate, we identified the firms mainly acting as local counsels and removed them from our list. The final ranking was based on the score calculated as the average of normalized values for number of cases and number of unique patents litigated for each firm.

We believe this is a more realistic model. We did not include the revenue of firms in our calculations as there are many good firms that take plaintiff cases on contingency and revenue will not appear for a while.

The Beta version of Patexia Ranking Engine is now released and ranking is available for all the firms that have been named as the plaintiff firm for at least one case in 2015. The top 25 firms can be viewed here:

Top 25 Plaintiff-Side Law Firms

The ranking for other firms (not the top 25) are visible on the same page but only to attorneys and staff of those firms if they use their firm’s email address to sign up at Patexia.

Next week, we will release the same ranking for all firms on the defendants’ side. Later, we will expand this to include prosecution data. The goal is to improve the Patexia Ranking Engine to include more parameters, such as the number of PTAB cases as well as the outcome of the cases so companies can get suggestions on the top firms based on a more data-driven model than pure opinions.

For example, the engine could identify the top firms with more than 50 attorneys that have represented life science cases on the defendant side, or it might be used to identify firms and/or attorneys representing petitioners in IPR challenges of microprocessor patents with the highest claim cancellation rate in those technology areas.

In another scenario, the engine could identify the top attorneys, located in a city such as Seattle and working for a firm with the national size larger than 100 attorneys, with at least 50 patents prosecuted in 4G/LTE area and average number of office actions within 20% of national average for those types of patent applications.

Based on the feedback received from different companies, this data-driven approach to patent world is preferred to other rankings that are purely based on revenue or size of the firm.

As of now, the Patexia Ranking Engine will update the ranking data at least once a quarter, with the goal of increasing the frequency to once a week as fresh data (prosecution, litigation, PTAB, etc.) becomes available.