IP Clearinghouse Launched

It sounds like an audacious goal: to build a database addressing all intellectual property litigation in the United States. Yet, that is exactly what Stanford’s Intellectual Property Litigation Clearinghouse (IPLC) is in the process of doing. And by all indications, it is well on the way to accomplishing its mission.

Mark Lemley (BA ’88), William H. Neukom Professor of Law, serves as the IPLC’s faculty supervisor. Lemley and Matt Lynde of Cornerstone Research conceived of the clearinghouse. Cornerstone is one of IPLC’s primary investors with additional support from Intel, Oracle, QUALCOMM, and the law firms of Heller Ehrman and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe.

The IPLC will attempt to collect and analyze select data on every available patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret case in the United States. Driving this ambitious task is IPLC Director Joshua Walker, who received his BA from Harvard and his JD from the University of Chicago Law School. Walker has more than a decade of experience in designing and implementing systems at the nexus of law and computer science.

“In the IP realm,” says Walker, “attorneys and policymakers frequently make decisions of enormous import on the basis of personal experience alone or even ‘anecdata.’ Particularly in the biotech and pharmaceuticals environments, such policy decisions may have life and death consequences.”

By collecting and analyzing key litigation statistics, the IPLC hopes to provide a reliable, comprehensive online resource for scholars, policymakers, industry, attorneys, and experts, much like Stanford’s hugely successful Securities Class Action Clearinghouse, upon which the IPLC is modeled.

The IPLC successfully completed a prototype system last October and is now developing a more robust database focused on patent litigation in five high-volume federal districts. Next, the IPLC will collect and analyze patent cases in the remaining districts and then extend its subject matter coverage to copyright, trademark, and all available trade secret cases. For additional information, contact Ansel Halliburton, IPLC analyst, at anseljh@stanford.edu.