The relationship between patent citations and litigation

Citation and litigation are two words that rhyme,

But do these words share any correlation in the mean time?

Is there any relationship among these two latent,

Can citations provide a cue to litigation potential of a patent?

This very question had kept me curious for a while,

I wanted answers, agile, in a research backed style.

Thus began my search, of literature on the subject,

Unraveling the hidden relationships became my project.

I found scholarly papers, both old and new,

That had conclusions on the relationship, unraveled by a few.

The relationship was not as simple as it appeared to the eye,

There were deeper threads beneath, and that aint a lie.

Starts are always simple, whispered the curious mind,

The study by Lanjouw on the subject was the first find.

Conducted on a dataset involving 3887 patents between 1975-91,

The insights explored connection among claims, citations and litigation.

The paper attempted to uncover stylized facts of litigation,

And one related to citations deserves utmost attention.

Litigated patents are far more heavily cited was one important conclusion,

Domestic or foreign owned- the results were akin, no matter the situation.

This very hypothesis has been cited by many, and proved by two,

But how was litigation impacted by forward citations that accrue?

Two possible explanations were given for the hypothesis,

The interrelationship among citation, litigation and value might be the chassis.

Citations are a great indicator for value of a patent,

And litigation and valuable patents displayed a positive correlation.

The interrelationship derived by statistics is one explanation,

And the second one signals towards the rate of innovation.

As a technology grows, leading to increased innovation,

Patenting activity progresses for the technology under construction.

In the quest to secure a majority of the pie,

Competing organizations try to get a patent over every feature that comes by.

As the point of convergence hits, lesser are the chances of mutual exclusion,

Every once in a while, there emerges competing claims that leads to litigation.

Sometimes infringement and other times design around might be a solution,

When latters the case, for the patent under question- theres increase in forward citation.
Citations play an important role in determining litigation,

But there is something about claims in the study that deserve a mention.

Litigated patents have far more claims and valuable those claims are too,

The point to be noted here is each valuable claim is likely to cite prior patents few.

Number of claims and forward citation for each claim plays a role too,

The probability of litigation rises based on these two.

The causality is not one-directional, but a two-side relationship they share,

When litigation onsets early in the life of a patent, the number of forward citations fare.

Backward citations, according to lanjouws study, play a negligible role.

But then theres a German study that doesnt agrees to this aspect, on the whole.

Based on analysis of suits filed in Europe and German district courts for a period of two years,

Katrin agrees to lanjouws hypothesis on forward citations but for backward citations, his opinion tears.

Adding one additional forward citation,

Can raise litigation probability by 4.5 percent.

But havoc reeks, he says, when number of backward citations increases,

As a consequence, the likelihood of patent infringement decreases.

Forward, backward, in the studies are both direct citations,

But there is far more complexity, that needs inspection.

Looking for deeper connections, I stumbled across this paper

That uncovered complex relationships, discovered by this author,

Direct citations, according to her, tell only a part of the story,

But there are instances when significant prior art is left out in theory.

Knowing the relationship that exists between citation and litigation,

An in-depth citation analysis to find litigation prone patents is her proposed solution

Not just direct, but indirect and latent citations, her study examines,

Involving patents of the plaintiff, and those of the defendant, in an analysis of 13000 cases.

Another group that her study cites are patents cited by defendant patents,

The very patents that cites plaintiffs patents, forming an indirect relation.

For the calculation of latent citation, she took into account plaintiff and defendant patents,

And in addition the patents that were cited by both defendant and plaintiffs patents.

Now that she had the data, it was computation time,

The statistics revealed relationships that disclosed insights sublime.

The defendants patents directly cited plaintiffs patents a meager amount of time,

But indirect citations at greater depths disclosed far more association grime.

The covers were pulled on the fact that indirect citations can serve as bait,

That would help examine litigation prone patents at a far better rate.

Done with direct, lets talk latent, there is another association,

Patents that shared a latent citation relationship normally faced each other at litigation.

Out of a refined data set of 5200 patents, lets talk a sum total of in/direct and latent citations,

60% of litigated patents in the dataset showed a citation relation.

The insights dont end here, theres another interesting association:

A patent that cites litigated patent has greater chances of undergoing litigation.

Forward citations, we have talked a lot about, but do backward play a part?

It indeed does we found out when goal is to take non-litigated patents from litigated patents apart.

The student team at University of Virginia authored another paper,

In an attempt to build a model that differentiated non-litigated patents from the ones litigated.

They constructed two models, one based on forward citations and other using backward,

The results were interesting, as the importance of backward citations cant be mitigated.

Both models they constructed to separate patents did their job well,

Forward citations, as usual, outranked and were an instant sell.

Backward citations nonetheless too did its job, which is important to know

For the instances are many, when you wont have forward citations thatd results show.

Forward citations, as they say, accrue over a period of time,

When the goal is tell apart litigation-prone from non-litigated ones for new patents,

Backward citations tell the story in a manner sublime.

And thats how I reached the end of my quest.

For now I understand the relationship, now that I have reached the crest.

Citation and litigation are a match made in patent heaven,

The significance of which a very few people reckon.