What entities sued for Patent Infringement in 2011?

Anoop Gopakumar and his group at MaxVal provide patent litigation alerts every day and today Anoop provided me with some interesting data on patent filings over the past year.

3963 patent litigation cases were filed 2011.

I’ve posted below a detailed chart analysis of who filed those patent lawsuits. The first chart below looks at the top-25 filers of patent infringement lawsuits during the past year. 

Patent Group LLC, a non-practicing entity (NPE) filed the most patent lawsuits in 2011. The PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) group defines NPE as

“an NPE is an entity that does not have the capabilities to design, manufacture, or distribute products that have features protected by the patent.”

The second table breaks down the number of lawsuits filed by month.

If you want to get a free year of alerts you can follow this link and sign up and register for free alerts regarding patent litigation. It’s free and you can also download the complaints that these companies filed to initiate the lawsuits and see the actual allegations of patent infringement and how the big-time law firms put together a complaint regarding patent infringement.

I just looked through some of the Maxval free patent tools that they provide. Clearly these free tools  can certainly help analyzing patents with regard to infringement and otherwise. I like the USPTO widget that they provide which instantly displays bibliographic details, publication full text of the document as well as assignment details and maintenance fees that are owed. It certainly worked very well the time that I tried it.

I’m going to take part in this litigation alert and make an analysis over the next couple months as to who and what types of companies are filing patent litigation complaints and perhaps even take a look at the complaints and how they are making these allegations. So keep an eye out for blog posts in the future that will analyze patent litigation based upon the alerts that I receive from MaxVal.