How to detemine if a patent has been litigated over

September 19, 2006 on 6:51 am | In Patent Searching |

Question from a reader:

Do you know of a free way to find out existing court case regarding a US patent? That is, given a patent number, can I easily (or freely) find out the existing law suit about the patent and documents filed relating to the case?

Free, no.  However you can use Shepards via Lexis Pay As You Go (http://web.lexis.com/xchange/forms/uas/catalog.asp [$6 per search]) to do it.  You’d just Shepardize "patno x,xxx,xxx".  That would tell you if the patent was ever part of a suit.  You could then use PACER (http://pacer.psc.uscourts.gov/) to pull information about the case (if it is from the past few years).

As for monitoring NEW lawsuits, Rethink(IP) has an email newsetter (free trial) that sends out weekly updates of recently filed lawsuits.  See:  http://www.rethinkip.com/rssmojo/archives/introducing_patent_lawsuit_mojo.html 

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