Month: August 2026

New analysis also finds broad-based growth beyond high-volume plaintiffs, record design patent filings, continued concentration in the Eastern District of Texas, and more than $2.3 billion in 2025 patent damages

San Jose, CA, August 5, 2026 — LexisNexis^® Legal & Professional announced today the release of the Lex Machina^® 2026 Patent Litigation Report, a comprehensive, data-driven analysis of trends shaping U.S. patent litigation in federal district and appellate courts and before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). Powered by insights from Lex Machina^®, the LexisNexis^® Legal Analytics^® platform, the report examines key developments from 2023 through 2025, places those findings in historical context dating back to 2016, and includes current observations from the first half of 2026. The analysis encompasses 38,893 patent cases filed in U.S. district courts and 3,589 federal circuit court cases docketed from 2016 through 2025, together with PTAB petitions and appeals.

Key findings from the report include: 

• District court patent filings reach a ten-year high before pulling back in 2026: Plaintiffs filed 4,547 patent cases in 2025, a 19.6 percent increase over 2024 and the highest total in the 2016–2025 period. From January 1 through June 30, 2026, claimants filed approximately 1,900 new patent lawsuits, putting 2026 on pace to finish comfortably below the record level reached in 2025. 

• Patent damages remain above $2 billion for a fourth consecutive year: Courts awarded $2.353 billion in patent damages across 63 cases in 2025, excluding fees and interest. From 2023 through 2025, reasonable royalty awards totaled $8.156 billion, with $8.066 billion awarded through verdicts, underscoring the continuing role of juries in the highest-value patent recoveries. 
• PTAB activity enters a sharp slowdown: Inter partes review petitions fell approximately 8 percent to 1,208 in 2025, while post-grant review petitions increased to 75, their highest level since 2021. In the first half of 2026, parties filed only 201 PTAB petitions—fewer than in any other half-year period in at least a decade.

“Patent litigation strategy depends not only on understanding the law, but also on knowing how cases are actually progressing through the courts and PTAB,” said Michael J. Flynn, Partner at Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell LLP. “The Lex Machina Patent Litigation Report provides practical benchmarks on filings, venues, timing, outcomes, and damages that help us identify meaningful shifts and inform our clients’ litigation strategies.”

“The 2026 Patent Litigation Report captures a litigation landscape in transition,” said Eric Wright, senior vice president for Lex Machina at LexisNexis. “District court filings reached a ten-year high in 2025, with growth extending well beyond high-volume plaintiffs, while the first half of 2026 brought a pronounced slowdown—especially at the PTAB. In an environment this dynamic, legal teams need clear benchmarks on venue, timing, parties, counsel, outcomes, and damages. Lex Machina gives practitioners the data-backed intelligence to assess risk earlier, allocate resources more effectively, and make more confident litigation and business-development decisions.”

To request a copy of the report, visit LexisNexis.com/LexMachina.

The Lex Machina platform equips litigation professionals to develop stronger case strategies and generate business. From precise timing metrics that inform legal budgeting to trend data on top law firms and leading judges, Lex Machina supplements traditional legal research and experience with customized, data-backed insights. These insights help lawyers identify and pursue new matters, navigate motion and trial strategies, and negotiate smarter settlements, ultimately giving firms a competitive edge in litigation.

About LexisNexis^® Legal & Professional 

LexisNexis^® Legal & Professional provides AI-powered legal, regulatory, business information, analytics and workflows that help customers increase their productivity, improve decision-making, achieve better outcomes, and advance the rule of law around the world. As a digital pioneer, the company was the first to bring legal and business information online with its Lexis^® and Nexis^® services. LexisNexis Legal & Professional, which serves customers in more than 150 countries with 11,900 employees worldwide, is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers.

About Lex Machina 

Lex Machina^® fundamentally changes how companies and law firms compete in the business and practice of law. The company provides strategic insights on judges, lawyers, law firms, parties, and other critical information across 22 federal practice areas and a rapidly growing number of state courts. Lex Machina allows law firms and companies to anticipate the behaviors and outcomes that different legal strategies will produce, supporting more effective case strategy and business development efforts.

Lex Machina was named Winner of the “Overall LegalTech Data Solution Provider of the Year” LegalTech Breakthrough Award 2025, “Best Data Analytics & Insight Solution” 2025 CODiE Award, and Winner of the “Media Excellence Award” for Analytics/Big Data 2024. Based in Silicon Valley, Lex Machina is part of LexisNexis^®, a leading global provider of legal, regulatory, and business information and analytics. For more information, please visit https://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/lex-machina.page.

Michael J. Flynn is a customer of Lex Machina.

Media Contact

Venture PR lexmachina@venturepr.co 

Legal professionals, LexisNexis engineers, and AI collaborators like OpenAI and Amazon Web Services build side by side, solving workflow pain points with prototypes in hours and trusted products in weeks

NEW YORK, August 4, 2026 – LexisNexis^® Legal & Professional today announced the opening of its Customer Innovation Lab in New York City, a new model for how legal AI gets built and shipped. The Lab brings legal professionals, LexisNexis engineers, and AI technology collaborators together from the first working session to build as one team. Solutions to real legal challenges and novel ways to accomplish legal work become tested prototypes in hours or days and production-ready capabilities within weeks.

Here’s how the Lab works: Legal professionals from law firms, corporate legal departments, the judiciary, and academia bring specific pain points and new ideas on legal practice into the Lab. LexisNexis engineers build against them in real time. Prototypes are designed and tested that same day against the problems they were built to solve, then advance only if they clear LexisNexis’s standards for quality, accuracy, and security. Successful prototypes advance into new ways of working and new skills or agents within the LexisNexis agentic platform, either customized for the customer or scaled across the core LexisNexis platform.

Watch Greg Dickason, LexisNexis Chief Technology Officer, explain this new model: https://youtu.be/H6hAHEn1-Yo.

Already shipping from the Lab: The Lab has already turned ideation with dozens of customers into working prototypes and designs that have advanced into Lexis+^® with Protégé capabilities coming soon, including:

• LexisNexis-developed legal AI models. The Lab is advancing LexisNexis-developed models purpose-built for legal work, using authoritative legal content and deep legal expertise to improve performance, efficiency, and accuracy across complex legal tasks.
• An advanced, customer-managed Protégé Vault for analyzing complex multimedia materials. Legal professionals will be able to securely store and analyze documents, videos, images, audio files, and other matter materials. A lawyer could, for example, analyze a two-hour deposition in minutes with Protégé, pinpoint the exact moments when key facts emerge, and trace findings directly to the timestamps and source materials.
• Secure Protégé Workrooms for collaboration across teams. Legal professionals will be able to bring together and share documents, analyses, skills, and AI-assisted work related to a given matter with internal teams, outside counsel, clients, experts, and authorized participants, with precise permissions and access controls, all within the same secure LexisNexis environment.

What the Lab is solving now: The Lab is addressing legal drafting quality as a top priority in legal work. Independent research shows lawyers spend 40 to 60 percent of their time drafting and reviewing documents and contracts, more than on any other legal task. LexisNexis has confirmed this pattern directly with customers who identify the complex nature of legal drafting – including personalization, tonality, subject matter expertise, strategic positioning, and legal accuracy – as an unmet need.

The Lab is building, prototyping, and testing AI and agentic drafting capabilities that:

• Adapt to a firm’s or organization’s drafting style, precedents, and playbooks
• Flag risk and suggest redlines against a customer’s own standards
• Carry context across related documents, enabling legal professionals to draft a primary document and supporting materials without starting from scratch
• Provide document-aware editing tools tailored to the type of legal document being created
• Preserve lawyer control through visible AI-generated edits, Track Changes, and version history
• Surface LexisNexis proprietary trust markers at the point of need, helping users verify their work without the need for multi-step or cut-and-paste accuracy checks
• Integrate essential LexisNexis legal and predictive analytics including litigation, judicial, and regulatory analytics to inform more strategic and higher-quality drafting

AI technology collaborators, including OpenAI and Amazon Web Services, participate alongside customers and LexisNexis teams to explore how the latest model capabilities can be applied to complex legal work. LexisNexis engineers anchor every Lab session, applying LexisNexis’s secure infrastructure, authoritative content, and validation standards to evaluate every model output.

“Congratulations to LexisNexis on the opening of its Customer Innovation Lab. This new space reflects a shared belief that the most meaningful AI innovation happens through close collaboration with customers. We are thrilled to support LexisNexis as it turns that collaboration into new products and experiences with real-world impact.” — OpenAI

“Congratulations to LexisNexis on the launch of its Customer Innovation Lab,” said Scott Liska, VP AWSI, Amazon Web Services. “Bringing trusted AI into professional work requires both rapid innovation and a strong technology foundation. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with LexisNexis as it advances secure, authoritative AI capabilities for legal professionals.”

“Our vision is to empower customers with world-leading, purpose-built, and trusted legal AI,” said Greg Dickason, Chief Technology Officer, LexisNexis Legal & Professional. “The Customer Innovation Lab changes who’s in the room when legal AI gets built. Customers help originate and shape what we build from day one. Our job is to validate it, ground it in citable legal authority, and decide what’s ready to scale into Lexis+ with Protégé, the platform our customers rely on every day.”

The Customer Innovation Lab launches in New York City as an ongoing operation, with plans to expand globally. Interested law firms and legal departments can learn more at www.lexisnexis.com/lab.

About the LexisNexis Customer Innovation Lab

The LexisNexis Customer Innovation Lab brings legal professionals, LexisNexis engineers, and AI collaborators together to build legal AI solutions in real time. Rather than validating AI capabilities after they’re built, customers help originate and shape them from the first working session, turning their most complex legal work challenges into tested prototype solutions in hours or days, and trusted product-ready capabilities within weeks. Every capability advanced from the Lab is developed within LexisNexis’s private, secure, enterprise-grade infrastructure and must meet LexisNexis’s standards for quality, accuracy, and legal-domain performance before reaching customers. Capabilities are grounded in LexisNexis’s foundation of authoritative legal content that includes 200 billion documents and records with four million additions daily, 150 years of attorney-led curation, and Shepard’s^® citation intelligence.

About LexisNexis^® Legal & Professional

LexisNexis^® Legal & Professional provides AI-powered legal, regulatory, business information, analytics, and workflows that help customers increase their productivity, improve decision-making, achieve better outcomes, and advance the rule of law around the world. As a digital pioneer, the company was the first to bring legal and business information online with its Lexis^® and Nexis^® services. LexisNexis Legal & Professional, which serves customers in more than 150 countries with 11,900 employees worldwide, is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers.