Patent cases are different today and need updated courts
William Alsup, 2019 – United States district judge of Northern District of California; “Huge Numbers of Patent Cases: How One District Judge Manages Them - The 2018 Supreme Court IP Review Address”; https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1220&context=ckjip
I share that story to illustrate that when it comes to picking a jury, one side is going to want somebody that they can bamboozle; they want to knock the people off who can actually understand the patent and understand the science and where the motor uses whatever it is that the motor uses.
Another major difference is that competitor-competitor suits are less common today. These companies have now built up their own arsenal of patents—so a company asserting patents against a competitor could lead to mutual destruction. But that dynamic is not present with non-practicing entities—they do not have any products of their own, so they have nothing to lose.
So, much of patent litigation today is brought by non-practicing entities, and they will sue everyone in the industry who has an analog to digital conversion or who has a motor or power supply on the theory that somewhere in your product, you will infringe one of the many patents in the portfolio. That’s another difference between then and now. Back when I had that conversation with my friend, Mike Jacobs, in the late ‘80s at Morrison & Forester when he said, “Look, we need to have an IP department,” the whole idea of a non-practicing entity hadn’t even developed yet.