As of January 1, 2011, PatentFreedom has identified and profiled over 380 distinct NPEs (a number which continues to increase). Since 1985, these NPEs have been involved in litigation with over 5,000 different operating companies in over 4,000 actions. And the pace of activity is clearly increasing.

As the figure below shows, the top 25 companies have been relentlessly pursued by NPEs.

Ranking of Operating Companies by Number of NPE Lawsuits

In preparing these data, PatentFreedom has removed administrative duplicates (e.g., consolidations, change in venue, etc.), so that these numbers should reflect the actual count of distinct NPE lawsuits, year-by-year.

Note – this data and the data shown elsewhere is drawn from PatentFreedom’s current database of NPEs, which has been built “from the ground up” and is thus necessarily incomplete. It will continue to grow and develop over time as we discover more entities that are reasonably classified as NPEs. For purposes of PatentFreedom’s classification, we define a NPE as any entity that derives substantial revenue from the licensing or enforcement of patents and for which we have been unable to obtain verifiable evidence that the entity sells products or services that would make it vulnerable to patent counter-assertion.