The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has issued its 2008 annually report* analyzing the federal court case load for fiscal year 2008.  The Northern District of Illinois remains an important IP court, ranking fourth in IP case filings for 2008, with 385 cases filed, behind the Central District of California, the Southern District of New York and the Northern District of California.

Nationwide, patent and trademark case filings remained steady with only slight increases, but copyright case filings fell over 25%.  One other interesting note, almost four percent of patent cases terminated in 2008 went through a trial.  That is a relatively large amount of trials in the federal courts where an average of 1% of cases are tried.  The 3% difference is not enough to show a post-eBay trend of increasing trials, but it could be the beginning of such a trend.

For more analysis of the report check out Peter Zura’s 271 Patent Blog and Patently-O.

*  Click here to read the report.