In the last issue of the Litigation Section newsletter I explored the concept of becoming better. Better lawyer, better practice, better person. This year as I take over as Chair of the Litigation Section, my goal is to achieve betterment. I envision making this Section rise to a level of becoming something better and more valuable to you, its members. It is hard to measure improvement if you d...

In this paper I introduce what I call the reduced form approach to studying the plaintiff’s win rate in litigation selection models. A reduced form comprises a joint distribution of plaintiff’s and defendant’s beliefs concerning the probability that the plaintiff would win in the event a dispute were litigated; a conditional win rate function that tells us the actual probability of a plaintiff ...

This paper is a non-technical summary of Harrington (2004). Standard methods for calculating antitrust damages in price-fixing cases are shown to create a strategic incentive for firms to price excessively high during the post-cartel phase which causes an overestimate of the but for price and an underestimate of the level of damages. The extent to which damages are underestimated is greater, th...

This paper investigates the characteristics of litigated patents by combining for the firsttime information about patent case filings from the U.S. district courts and detailed datafrom the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. We construct a series of indicators for thefactors which the theoretical literature suggests contribute to litigation: frequency ofdisputes, the size and asy...

Intellectual property portfolios that include unique inventions and discoveries are potentially inimitable resources that provide strategic leverage to Information Technology (IT) firms. The increasing patent related litigations in the IT industry, and the high costs associated with litigations make this an economically significant activity. Taking a market oriented view to this issue we invest...