Intellectual Property Law

Federal Courts Release Report on 2007 Case Statistics

By Michael Atkins

Last week, the Administrative Office of the United States Courts released its annual report on the “Judicial Business of the United States Courts.” There’s a lot of statistical information in there. Most is organized by judicial district, but some is broken down into both case area and judicial district. For instance, the report states 49 trademark cases were filed in the Western District in the year ending September 30, 2007. Sixty-three trademark cases were terminated in that time, and 29 were pending.

Those figures are a bit higher than my own analysis of Western District trademark cases (see here and here). My review of the federal courts’ PACER database in January showed that 28 trademark cases were filed in the Western District in the calendar year 2007, and 51 cases filed between 2005 and 2007 were closed. I did not count cases that remained pending in 2007.

The courts’ report shows the Western District dwarfs its sister district to the east when it comes to trademark activity. The Eastern District of Washington had only one trademark case filed, three terminated, and one pending in the year ending September 2007.

The Western District had 32 total trials during that time (17 jury, 15 nonjury). The median case that was disposed of in the year ending September 2007 lasted 8.1 months. The median case that was disposed of by trial lasted 19 months. (My analysis showed two trademark cases went to trial in the Western District in 2007.)

In all federal courts, 3,647 trademark cases were disposed of in the year ending September 2007. Thirty-three percent were terminated without any court action. Sixty-seven percent were terminated by court action. Fifty-five percent terminated before trial; 11% during or after pretrial; approximately 0.6% in a nonjury trial; and approximately 1% in a jury trial. As these figures indicate, less than 1.7% of all trademark filings were disposed of in a trial of any kind.

Thanks to the Trial Ad (and other) Notes for publicizing this report.

Full post as published by Seattle Trademark Lawyer on March 17, 2008 (boomark / email).