I analyzed 9,700 asserted patents from 6,500 litigations over the last five years and compared them to a control set of 10,000 randomly selected granted patents from the same period. Here's the insights I found most interesting:

1) You can't prosecute your way into being asserted.

Office Action histories are nearly identical: 94% of both asserted and control patents received 4 or fewer Office Actions (median = 1).

2) Asserted patents were disproportionately continuations.

50% of asserted patents were continuations, vs. 20% of the broader population.

3) Assertion was more often bought than built.

Control patents sit closer to a 38% acquired to 62% organic split, but litigated patents skew toward acquisition.

Across litigated patents, ~55% were acquired, and the data shows this skew persists at ~42% even for operating companies(filtering out NPEs)

From just these 3 stats, the data clearly says: run a pruning program if you want a high ROI patent portfolio. In the past 5 years, assertion value was concentrated in a small subset of patents that are cleanly prosecuted, continuation-rich, and market-selected (often acquired) — so most portfolios may be overfunding low-ROI assets and should prune to redirect resources on the few patents that can actually generate returns.

We're working on a full report combining USPTO data with AI analysis grounded in web research. The report will include detailed breakdowns across the three categories below. I’ll share more insights over the coming weeks. And if there are additional angles you’d like us to analyze, tell us & we’ll crunch the data if it's accessible.

Patent Properties

• Patent type (utility / design / reissue)
• Continuation vs not
• Family size
• Acquired vs organic
• Spec metrics: # of independent claims, # of drawings, word count, paragraph count, first-claim word count (broken down by industry)
• Years since priority (age)
• Number of inventors

Patent “Quality” Signals

• Track One vs not
• Number of office actions to allowance
• Forward citations

Litigation & Parties

• Venue
• Reason for litigation
• NPE vs operating company
• Industry of parties
• Operating-company industry relationship
• Market caps (operating companies)
• Num unique assertors vs. num unique defendants