Case
Predicting the Essentiality of Standard Essential Patents
A leading communications technology company engaged Analysis Group in this strategy project to build a prediction model of the likelihood that a declared set of standard essential patents (SEPs) would be deemed truly essential if challenged in court. Companies self-declare SEPs in order to protect technologies necessary to meet the industry specifications established by independent standard-setting organizations. However, because patent holders are required to declare all patents that might be essential, some of the patents at issue may not actually rise to the level of essentiality.
Analysis Group's team – led by Managing Principal Marc Van Audenrode and Principal Jimmy Royer – analyzed a set of SEPs declared for the 4G LTE cellular standard. These came from a novel dataset of thousands of SEPs, which a team of engineers independently reviewed and categorized as truly essential or not in order to identify patent and company attributes associated with technical essentiality. They found that technical essentiality is best predicted if the declaration is made against a specific technical specification document. These and other insights from the study may be useful for informing the ongoing policy debates over standards, licensing of SEPs, and the patent system.
The team also used innovative natural language processing tools to incorporate information from the text of the patent claims into the model to develop predictions of how likely a SEP is to be considered truly essential.
Meet Our People
Marc Van Audenrode*
Managing Principal*Dr. Van Audenrode is an expert in data analysis and econometrics, labor economics, antitrust and competition policy, and public economics. He has consulted to clients - including law firms and government agencies - in Canada, the US, and Europe. Dr. Van Audenrode’s work includes developing a methodology to value desktop software; he also developed expertise valuing goods as varied as restaurant franchises, executive stock options, or smartphone features. His recent work in public economics includes evaluating the economic rent from hydroelectricity to the Canadian economy and the value of logging rights on the ancestral territory of a Canadian First Nation. In the area of labor economics, his work has included filing an expert report assessing fair compensation for Quebec provincial judges and Quebec prosecutors and advising Quebec’s commission on pay equity. Dr. Van Audenrode has filed expert reports in courts in the US, Canada, Belgium, Germany, France, and the Netherlands, and has testified in Canada and the US. He recently filed a report with the Amsterdam Court of Appeal in support of the settlement reached between Ageas and claimant organizations in the Fortis case, the largest settlement ever reached through the Dutch Collective Settlement Act (WCAM). Dr. Van Audenrode’s scientific research and articles have been published in numerous peer-reviewed academic journals and trade journals. He is a coauthor of the book The Mutual Fund Industry: Competition and Investor Welfare, and is a frequent presenter at industry and academic conferences.
*Marc Van Audenrode srl