Changing landscape of PAEs

Winston & Strawn’s MikeTomasulo, Danielle Williams and Kevin Boyle explain how a new trend in patentlitigation is emerging along with a rise in damages

There is a new trend in patent litigationand, for innovators, it is a disconcerting one. Forat least the last 20 years, companies, sometimes called patent assertion entities(PAEs), have been acquiring patents and asserting them against innovators. Andwhile innovators have long claimed that PAEs were imposing a heavy tax on theirbusinesses, the stakes were often low and verdicts larger than $100m were quiterare, with less than 50 such verdicts from 2,000 through 2020. ¹