The number of lawsuits against U.S. companies has fallen, and businesses are filing fewer suits against one another, according to a new survey.
Seventeen percent of 253 companies surveyed didn’t face a new lawsuit from mid-2006 to mid-2007, up from 11 percent the previous 12 months. Corporations also filed fewer suits; 65 percent had filed a suit compared with 70 percent in 2005-2006.
“The trends in the [Washington] area are consistent with the national trend,” said John M. Simpson, head of litigation in Fulbright & Jaworski’s Washington office, the firm that conducted the study.
“The area of [intellectual property] litigation has become more and more important,” Simpson said, as 36 percent of U.S. companies saw an increase in patent infringement claims, while 10 percent saw a decrease and 54 percent said there had been no change.
Entertainment and corporate clients are “more aggressive in protecting the intellectual property” now than even two years ago, said Claudia Callaway, a Washington partner in the litigation group at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips.
Meanwhile, there has been a leveling off or slight decline in regulatory cases, such as those involving the Securities and Exchange Commission, Simpson said.
Forty-nine percent of companies said they saw an increase in the number of regulatory inquiries or investigations over the past three years when surveyed in mid-2006, compared with 36 percent of those questioned in mid-2007.
However, firms are seeing an increase in litigation, including regulatory, the type that D.C. law firms tend to handle.
Regulatory litigation is “not slowing down at all,” Callaway said. The firm added litigation lawyers nationwide by 10 or 15 percent.
Two other firms with offices in Washington indicated the same trends.
