Patexia Insight 132: The Most Active Companies in ITC Investigations (2022)
A couple of weeks ago, we released our third ITC Intelligence Report that covered 370 ITC investigations filed under Section 337 between January 1, 2016, through December 31, 2021. The report provided high-level statistics based on these cases as well as the activity and performance rankings in different categories of all parties and their representatives. In today’s insight, we will cover the most active complainants and respondents out of a total of 2015 companies we evaluated. These companies were involved in at least one investigation during the period of our study.
The following chart shows the distribution of 370 ITC Section 337 investigations in the last 6 years. We observed a growing trend that started in 2019 and it peaked in 2021 with a total of 71 investigations and 242 unique patents.
The increase in the ITC filings seems to have fueled the lateral movements between Am Law 200 firms. We dedicated a new section in our ITC 2022 Report to the lateral moves in 2021 as the movements may indicate a change in the landscape and possibly further increase in the filing activity in the near future.
An interesting fact observed in the above chart is the increase in the number of unique patents and the significant increase in 2021. The cost and workload obviously increases almost linearly with the number of patents. Each of the patents has to be evaluated by experts, as infringement and validity arguments need to be prepared by both parties (complainants and respondents).
A total of 2015 companies participated in one or more of these investigations. However, the total number of complainants were a fraction of all respondents. We identified 324 complainants and 1,761 respondents and some obviously appeared on both ends in different investigations.
If our prediction and the changes in the ITC landscape, judged by numerous ITC lateral moves come true, we expect to see more complainants and as a result more ITC investigations in the coming years. We believe big law firms will work closely with their clients and litigation funds to leverage the US ITC as a new battlefield as they design their litigation strategy. This would give them an upper hand in negotiations and ultimately higher damages and more favorable settlements. The overall litigation cost will go up for both sides, but so will the profitability of IP litigation practices at big law firms.
To calculate the activity scores we did not simply count the cases. As the recent activity is a better indicator of how active an entity is, our activity score had different weights for different years. We slightly discounted the older cases. This helped the most recently active companies to rank higher than other companies even if they had the same number of cases but filed in different years. The following two tables covers the top five most active respondents and complainants along with their activity scores as calculated in our latest ITC Intelligence Report:
| Respondent Activity Rank | Company | Respondent Cases | Respondent Activity Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Samsung Electronics | 19 | 100.00 |
| 2 | Apple Inc. | 19 | 99.32% |
| 3 | LG Electronics | 13 | 87.41% |
| 4 | Lenovo | 11 | 82.31 |
| 5 | Amazon.com, Inc. | 10 | 79.59% |
| Complainant Activity Rank | Company | Complainant Cases | Complainant Activity Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | LG Electronics | 5 | 100.00% |
| 2 | Xperi Corporation | 5 | 98.84% |
| 3 | Koninklijke Philips N.V. | 4 | 90.17% |
| 4 | Samsung Electronics | 3 | 79.19% |
| 5 | Ericsson | 3 | 79.19% |
Stay tuned as in the next few weeks we will cover more statistics from the ITC Intelligence Report as well as analyzing the most active and best performing ITC law firms and attorneys.