On November 2, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) sent a pair of letters regarding issues in district court patent litigation—one addressed to Drew Hirshfeld, performing the functions and duties of the Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and another letter co-written with Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) addressed to Chief Justice John Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court. While never mentioned by name, U.S. District Judge Alan D. Albright is unmistakably the subject of both letters, which expressed serious concerns about “unrealistic trial dates” and “open solicit[ation]” of patent cases from a single judge in the Waco Division of the Western District of Texas.

In mid-October, a pair of lawsuits were filed in the Eastern District of Virginia by different groups of professional models seeking damages and injunctive relief under the Lanham Act from adult entertainment clubs for the unauthorized use of the models’ images in promotional materials. The filings come at about the same time that the U.S. Supreme Court is considering a petition for writ of certiorari from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit which asks the nation’s highest court whether the Second Circuit was wrong to create a public prominence requirement that prevents lesser known models from being able to assert their rights to their own likeness.

Is patent litigation out of control? Has patent litigation ever been out of control? The answers to these questions largely depend upon your point of view, and as with most complex topics, the truth is nuanced. What is not nuanced are the numbers reported in the annual reports from the  Administrative Office of the United States Courts, which shows that the number of patent cases that reach trial are extremely few. In fact, the number of cases that make it to the final pre-trial conference represents a small subset of the number of cases that are filed. I initially started this research in 1997, while working on my Master’s thesis, which dealt with patent litigation and the use of alternative dispute resolution. The real growth in patent litigation over the last 40 years has taken place before trial. Between 1980 and 2020, the number of patent cases reaching trial ranged between a low of 63 (in the COVID-19 affect FY 2020) but was otherwise at a low o 64 (in FY 2019) and a high of 164 (in FY 2016). All are a remarkably low number of cases that proceed to trial given the number of patent lawsuits commenced.