Strategic Rationales and Outcomes of Patent Litigation

Patent litigation is not only a legal mechanism for enforcing IP rights but can also serve a range of strategic corporate purposes. However, existing research has often treated patent litigation as a relatively uniform event, paying limited attention to why firms initiate litigation and what they seek to achieve through it.

This international collaborative research project examines the strategic rationales underlying patent litigation and the outcomes associated with different litigation strategies. The project combines large-scale analysis of court documents with advanced text-analysis methods, including large language models, to identify and classify motives behind individual patent litigation cases.

The first phase of the research analysed 2,845 patent litigation cases filed in US district courts. It developed a text-based classification of strategic litigation rationales and investigated how litigation filings and the underlying motives relate to corporate performance outcomes. The project is now being extended to approximately 3,000 Chinese patent litigation cases. This comparative work will examine whether litigation rationales and outcomes differ between the US and Chinese institutional and legal contexts, while further developing and validating the classification framework.

The project is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge, Zhejiang University, the University of Münster in Germany, and East China Normal University in Shanghai.

Project lead

Prof Frank Tietze

Project team members:

Yulan Shen, Dr Thomas Schaeper, Dr Aocheng Tang, Dr David Lohmar, Arian Ahlers

Related publications

Viets, A., Schäper, T., Tietze, F. and Leker, J. (2025). “Advancing Patent Litigation Analysis: An LLM-Based Analysis of Rationales and Performance Outcomes.” Academy of Management Proceedings, 2025, 12804.