Trevor Cook of Bird & Bird points out that the EMW Picton Howell litigation stats we quoted in our recent post tell an unrepresentative part of the whole story. The Lord Chancellor's Dept/DCA/Ministry of Justice statistics on IP litigation (which we summarise in tabular form) show that 2006 was a terrible baseline year to choose - the increases in 2007 and 2008 merely restore the position earlier in the decade. These and many other fascinating things are to be found in Trevor's very readable "Users' Guide to Patents". Thanks, Trevor, for putting it in perspective. Are these variations statistically significant at all, or just noise? Comments welcome as always.
I am not sure that Trevor Cook's point is that relevant. Commercial litigation as a whole went through both a secular decline (see Woolf reforms) and a cyclical decline throughout the decade. Any break or reversal of this trend is significant and worthy of review.
ReplyDeleteYou only have to look at the graph that Trevor Cook has used above to see that what is happening in 2007 and 2008 is significant.
Anonymous, maybe my post wasn't that clearly worded - mea culpa. I wouldn't want to mis-attribute - Trevor's point was simply that the 07 and 08 figures shouldn't be seen in isolation, and your comment seems to agree that this is the case. The additional interpretation was mine.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to see the figures on commercial litigation as a whole. London Chancery cases certainly show a steady decline from 1993 (the earliest point for which I have data handy) at about 8,000 cases started a year down to around 4,000 a year since about 2002, and appear (with some noise) to be static at that level since then. But have cases shifted out of London? Or down to the county courts? Is it as a result of litigation reform, or cyclical/countercyclical (personally, I can't see a correlation to the economic cycle)? The IP figures don't closely track the Chancery trend since 2002, but is this just a small sample issue? And how reliable are the official statistics anyway? Further insights welcome.
These are not the UK litigation statistics; they are the England and Wales litigation statistics.
ReplyDeleteJonathan, apologies to you and others North of the border if we have inadvertantly been tactless. In our defence, I don't believe that we said these were "the" UK IP litigation statistics, as you claim. These are statistics for IP litigation in the UK (presently, England and Wales show no signs of declaring independence), even though they do not include all IP litigation in the UK - they lack E&W CC figures as well as those for NI and Scotland, as I think is clear from the postings.
ReplyDeleteIf you have a view on the substance of the posting, I would be interested in any statistics for IP litigation in Scotland? Do you feel that the position is different there?