The Private Costs of Patent Litigation

James Bessen and Michael Meurer

Working Papers from Research on Innovation

Abstract: This paper estimates the total cost of patent litigation to alleged infringers. We use a large sample of stock market event studies around the date of lawsuit filings for US public firms from 1984-99. We find that the total costs of litigation are much greater than legal fees and costs are large even for lawsuits that settle. Lawsuits cost alleged infringers about $28.7 million ($92) in the mean and $2.9 million in the median. Moreover, infringement risk rose sharply during the late 1990s to over 14% of R&D spending. Small firms have lower risk relative to R&D.

Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ind, nep-ino, nep-ipr and nep-pr~
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ssrn.com/abstract=983736

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:roi:wpaper:0701

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Research on Innovation
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jim Bessen ().