Patent Litigation Cases from U.S. District Courts (1963-2015)

74,623 unique U.S. district court patent litigation cases filed between 1963 and 2015. The dataset was collected by the Office of the Chief Economist from PACER and RECAP court records.

Use Cases

• Analyze litigation trends over the 1963-2015 time period to identify shifts in patent enforcement
• Study case outcomes and durations using district court case identifiers and filing dates
• Examine the distribution of cases across different U.S. district courts

Strengths

• Contains 74,623 unique district court cases
• Covers a long temporal range of over 50 years (1963-2015)
• Sourced from authoritative court records systems PACER and RECAP

Limitations

• Data is not current, ending in 2015
• Specific case details and column structure are not documented
• Access is via API only, which may require technical integration

Provenance

Source

Public Access to Court Electronics Records (PACER) and the RECAP repository

Collection Method

Collected and aggregated by the Office of the Chief Economist (OCE)

Time Range

1963 to 2015

Freshness

Last metadata update was 2025-09-30, but underlying data ends in 2015.

Geography

United States district courts