NPE Litigation Swung Upward by 24% in Q1 2024

NPEs added 420 defendants to patent litigation campaigns in Q1 2024, up by 24% from the same quarter last year (when NPEs added 339 defendants). First-quarter NPE filings fell by 13% compared to the trailing Q1 average for 2021-2023 and were 5% lower than in Q4 2023.

This increase in Q1 NPE filings stands in stark contrast to the first-quarter change one year prior: Q1 2023 was 35% lower than Q1 2022 (when NPEs added 521 defendants). One of the primary causes of that decrease was the fact that the once-prolific monetization firm IP Edge LLC stopped filing litigation in December 2022, after previously accounting for around 25% of all NPE litigation each quarter (consistently suing around 50 defendants per month) in its most recent active period. As a result, when the firm hit the pause button in response to pressure over disclosure requirements in Delaware, that change alone caused a significant drop in the relative NPE numbers for each subsequent quarter. Thus, while Q1 2022 included nearly 150 defendants from IP Edge litigation, Q1 2023 did not—with IP Edge filings accounting for most of the decrease. Excluding IP Edge activity, the gap was far smaller (a 10% decrease from Q1 2022 to Q1 2023).

IP Edge’s litigation pause has continued virtually uninterrupted into 2024. As such, because it filed almost no new cases in either Q1 2023 or Q1 2024—hitting just four defendants this past quarter—the impact of its litigation pause has now abated almost entirely due to the mere passage of time. The firm filed just four cases in the first quarter—all through a plaintiff, Bishop Display Tech LLC, that shows some of the hallmarks of a newer breed of IP Edge NPEs.

See RPX’s first-quarter review for more on this and other key trends that shaped patent litigation in Q1 2024.