DataCom, a company that filed many patents last year, was financially more successful last year than were its competitors, none of which filed many patents. It is ttherefore likely that DataCom owed its greater financial success to the fact that it filed many patents last year.
The argument is most vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that it presupposes what it sets out to demonstrate about the relationship between the financial success of DataCom's competitors and the number of patents they filed.