Patent litigation is expensive. As a result, many firms often engage in broad, costly searches in order to avoid suit. Other firms apply the opposite strategy, ignoring patents entirely.
In her new paper entitled Predicting Patent Litigation, Professor Colleen Chien addresses this systematic problem by examining the factors that lead patents to be litigated. Professor Chien focuses not on patents' intrinsic characteristics, which have been previously studied, but rather on characteristics acquired after the patent is born, such as changes of ownership, continued investment in the patent, and citations to the patent.
The results of her empirical assessment are striking: patents that end up in litigation possess markedly different acquired characteristics from patents that remain unlitigated. Professor Chien uses these differences to offer a model for assessing which patents are more likely to end up in litigation based on the use of both intrinsic and acquired characteristics.
The complete paper is available here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1911579.