The Northern District of Illinois continued its historically busy intellectual property docket in 2010.  The most interesting statistic is a huge jump in patent filings this year — 250 patent cases filed this year, nearly double 2009’s 137 filings.  And that is after a slight dip in filings from 2008 to 2009.  I will discuss the 2010 filings in more detail in a post later this month, but even correcting for false patent marking suits, not all of which are included in the 250 filings because plaintiffs did not uniformly identify false marking cases as patent cases on civil cover sheets filed with the complaints, there was a significant increase in patent filings.  That fits with my prediction in late 2008 that the Northern District’s new Local Patent Rules would drive cases to Chicago.*

Trademark cases continued their slow growth, showing a slight increase over 2009.  Finally, copyright cases increased, after falling off sharply in 2009.  This chart shows the number of yearly patent, trademark and copyright cases filed in the Northern District during calendar years 2006 through 2009 (data gathered from the Stanford IP Clearinghouse and Pacer):

Northern District IP Filings
Case Type 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
Patent 126 141 151 137 250
Trademark 136 130 128 136 143
Copyright 194 123 81 41 4

Click here for much more on the Local Patent Rules in the Blog’s archives.