Trends show trolls’ persistence

According to some industry observers, the risk from so-called patent trolls is in decline. Some believe that the inter partes review (IPR) process and the US Supreme Court ruling in Alice v CLS Bank have made it easier to invalidate patents and harder for trolls to litigate successfully. There’s a grain of truth here, but the impact is clearly limited to a relatively small number of nuisance patents. After a lull in 2014 while trolls assessed the impact of IPRs and Alice, litigation levels—and the quality of asserted patents—rose 
in 2015.