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Re:A Small Town Judge Who Sees a Quarter of the Nation’s Pat... by chris_wot on Thursday May 05, 2016 @04:19PM (#11639359)
There must be a way of doing a statistical analysis of the court's judgements to determine how fair they are. Anyone have any ideas how this could be done?

Incidentally, anyone who provides an answer that is patented will automatically get an upvote from me :-)

Re:A Small Town Judge Who Sees a Quarter of the Nation’s Pat... by dctoedt on Thursday May 05, 2016 @06:52PM (#11640296)
This 2010 article [1] by (the highly-regarded) Stanford law professor Mark Lemley [2] is old, but might be helpful. Excerpt: "Notably, the Eastern District of Texas, while it has a higher than average plaintiff win rate, is not in the top five districts.

This 2015 PwC study [3] notes that from 1995 to 2014, "Interestingly, patent holder success rates for the top seven judges also tend to exceed the overall success rate, particularly in the Eastern District of Texas." The three E.D. Tex. judges listed in the chart (at page 20 of the PDF) had patent-owner win rates of 63%, 73%, and 64% respectively.

[1] http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/Lemley.pdf

[2] https://law.stanford.edu/directory/mark-a-lemley/

[3] https://www.pwc.com/us/en/forensic-services/publications/ass...

Re:A Small Town Judge Who Sees a Quarter of the Nation’s Pat... by WildUtah on Thursday May 05, 2016 @10:38PM (#11641318)
It's not a matter of win and loss rates. The vast majority of patent cases are settled without trial. Especially in EDTX, patent defendants know they cannot get a fair trial and settle to avoid the outrageous verdicts that come out of Gilstrap's courtroom.

And it costs millions to even go to court in EDTX because of the extra special discovery and expert costs and timing restraints Gilstrap imposes on defendants.

Re:A Small Town Judge Who Sees a Quarter of the Nation’s Pat... by chris_wot on Thursday May 05, 2016 @11:50PM (#11641563)
Which would tend to indicate that the defendants believe that they will lose badly, no?

Thus the win and loss rates become interesting, because then it can be seen if the number of judgements against the defendants deviate significantly from the national mean.

Re:A Small Town Judge Who Sees a Quarter of the Nation’s Pat... by WildUtah on Friday May 06, 2016 @05:28AM (#11642692)
Actually the multi-million dollar cost of litigating in EDTX for defendants (it's cheap for plaintiffs) is usually more than the plaintiffs are asking for to settle. So defendants that expect to win big still have to settle and pay or they'll ruin their business.

Most EDTX patent defendants have under $10MM in revenue. Trolls target small companies in these suits more often than large ones.

Re:A Small Town Judge Who Sees a Quarter of the Nation’s Pat... by amelius on Thursday May 05, 2016 @06:25PM (#11640129)
I am afraid the biggest problem will not be the analysis, but it will be getting the right people to understand and appreciate the results.