Database for IP litigation sounds like a smart plan:
"When Joshua Walker worked with a team of lawyers in Kigali, Rwanda, to mount a case against the perpetrators of that country’s genocide, he built a database of trial evidence under wartime conditions. Targets of his investigation put a $1,000 bounty on him.
"Ten years later, the 32-year-old has war zones — and law school — behind him, and he’s building another ambitious legal database, intended to track all IP litigation in the United States. But this time, he’s doing it in Palo Alto, Calif.
[snip]"Stanford hopes to build the first database of all intellectual property litigation in the country. Organizers and financial backers of the project say it will help lawyers track ongoing cases and settlement trends. It should encourage academics to do more empirical research based on the data collected. And finally, it could help lawmakers and policymakers craft IP laws and regulations.
"We’re looking to become a real-time monitor and tool for measuring the efficiency of the IP adjudication in the U.S.,’ Walker said. ‘We want to track everything that’s happening in the system; who’s patenting what, how many lawsuits are being filed, where they are being filed, how judges are deciding the cases, and why are judges making the decisions they’re making.
[snip]"A brainchild of Stanford patent law professor Mark Lemley, the IP clearinghouse is modeled after the school’s successful online securities litigation database. Started in 1996 by law professor Joseph Grundfest to monitor the effect of the 1995 Private Securities Reform Act, the database has since become a handy resource for legal scholars, journalists and lawyers."
