{"id":1053,"date":"2009-11-04T11:29:58","date_gmt":"2009-11-04T17:29:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/?p=1053"},"modified":"2009-11-04T11:29:58","modified_gmt":"2009-11-04T17:29:58","slug":"lies-damned-lies-and-statistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/?p=1053","title":{"rendered":"Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;&#8221;There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.&#8221;\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0&#8211;Samuel Clemens<\/p>\n<p>In a recent post, I listed the Top Ten Federal Circuit Oral Advocates\u00a0of 2006 [<a href=\"http:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/?p=860\">Link<\/a>].\u00a0 As an afterthought to compiling that list, I checked to see which of the oral advocates were also registered patent attorneys.\u00a0 Interestingly, five on the list were registered patent attorneys and five were not.\u00a0 I was curious how those numbers compared to the entire\u00a0pool of oral advocates arguing patent cases at the Federal Circuit in 2006.<\/p>\n<p>What I found was that the numbers\u00a0tracked closely.\u00a0 There were 106 registered attorneys and 103 unregistered attorneys that argued patent cases before the Federal Circuit in 2006:<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Appellant<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Appellee<\/span><\/p>\n<p>59*\/41\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a047*\/62<\/p>\n<p>*Registered Patent Attorney<\/p>\n<p>The reason that there are more attorneys in the appellant category is that in some cases there were multiple defendants and that led to multiple defendant attorneys\u00a0arguing at oral argument &#8212; after listening to many oral arguments, I can tell you that that approach rarely comes\u00a0across well.\u00a0 Also, for purposes of this comparison, I categorized a cross-appellant in the appellee category.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll leave it to others to argue why the appellant and appellee ratios are lopsided.\u00a0 Do the unregistered attorneys\u00a0constitute the majority\u00a0in the appellee category\u00a0and the minority\u00a0in the appellant category\u00a0because unregistered attorneys are\u00a0more\u00a0talented litigators and therefore more successful\u00a0at the trial level?\u00a0 Or, do the numbers suggest that general practice firms are more successful at trial than IP focused firms?\u00a0 Or, do they suggest that non-practicing entities are more often represented by unregistered attorneys?\u00a0 Lies, damned lies, and statistics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;&#8221;There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.&#8221;\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0&#8211;Samuel Clemens In a recent post, I listed the Top Ten Federal Circuit Oral Advocates\u00a0of 2006 [Link].\u00a0 As an afterthought to compiling that list, I checked to see which of the oral advocates were also registered patent attorneys.\u00a0 Interestingly, five on the list were [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1053"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1077,"href":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053\/revisions\/1077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.717madisonplace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}