The FTC study of business practices of patent assertion entities drew mixed reviews Thursday during a Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law Searle Center on Law, Regulation and Economic Growth event. Last week’s report proposed several changes to mitigate what the FTC called “nuisance infringement litigation” by PAEs. The recommendations are largely to balance the rights of defendants during the early stages of patent lawsuits by the entities, the FTC said (see 1610060045).

U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Judge Douglas Ginsburg and Searle Center leaders said FTC findings don’t fully justify the accompanying policy recommendations. Commissioner Terrell McSweeny and other lawyers said they believe the report would be valuable in influencing the debate even though the document’s scope was narrower than originally anticipated.

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Stanford University Law School professor Mark Lemley defended the report as a “modest success, not a failure.” It resulted in collection of data “that we didn’t have before” and that “demonstrates that there is a problem out there, though it is a narrower and more focused problem than people might otherwise have thought,” Lemley said. “The recommendations in the report are eminently sensible and fit logically within the framework of the study.”

The document is important in part because it validates what already had been a growing sense that PAEs aren’t a “monolithic concept” as previously had been suggested in the lobbying for a patent litigation revamp on Capitol Hill and elsewhere, Lemley said. Charles River Associates Vice President Anne Layne-Farrar cautioned against drawing many conclusions about the behavior of portfolio PAEs based on the findings, since the study included only four entities that fit into that category.