The Patent Litigation Dataset has been updated as of December 2019 and now contains detailed patent litigation data on 81,350 unique district court cases filed during the period 1963-2016. OCE and partners at the University of San Diego Law School collected all of the data from the Public Access to Court Electronics Records (PACER) and RECAP, an independent project designed to serve as a repository for litigation data sourced from PACER. The final output datasets, provided in six different files, include information on the litigating parties involved and their attorneys; the cause of action; the court location; important dates in the litigation history; and descriptions of all documents submitted in a given case, which cover more than 5 million separate documents contained in the case docket reports. There is also a new sixth file with hand-coded information on patent-in-suit and case type for most cases filed between 2003 and 2016.
A document describing the original data release is available and can be cited as: Marco, A., A. Tesfayesus, A. Toole (2017). “Patent Litigation Data from US District Court Electronic Records (1963-2015).” USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2017-06. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2942295. There is also an addendum to the original document, which describes changes to the Dataset and can be accessed below.
A document describing the hand-coded patent and case type variables can be cited as Schwartz, D., T. Sichelman, R. Miller (2019). “USPTO Patent Number and Case Code File Dataset Documentation.” USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2019-05. Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3507607.
For questions, please email EconomicsData@uspto.gov
Documentation
- US District Courts Patent Litigation: Docket Reports Data 1963-2015
- Addendum
- USPTO Patent Number and Case Code File Dataset Documentation
Data Files
Download full set of data files for 2016 [.csv format (350 MB)][.dta format (374 MB)]
Download full set of data files for 2015 [.dta format (280 MB)][.csv format (274 MB)]
Download individual data files:
| File Name | 2015 | 2016 | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| cases | DTA 3.13 MB | CSV 2.94 MB | DTA 4.42 MB | CSV 4.69 MB |
| names | DTA 7.18 MB | CSV 6.92 MB | DTA 8.74 MB | CSV 8.74 MB |
| attorneys | DTA 19.1 MB | CSV 28.4 MB | DTA 28.6 MB | CSV 37.3 MB |
| documents | DTA 247 MB | CSV 233 MB | DTA 326 MB | CSV 294 MB |
| pacer_cases | DTA 3.01 MB | CSV 2.34 MB | DTA 3.04 MB | CSV 2.63 MB |
| patents | No data | No data | DTA 3.92 MB | CSV 2.89 MB |
The direct download pages for 2015 data and for 2016 data are also available.
Note: The DTA (Stata dataset) files are saved in the Stata-13 data file format for 2015 and the Stata-14 data file format for 2016.