2605.02178 Does Examiner Leniency Predict Patent-Litigation Resolution, and How Much of It Does Settlement Selection Hide?
We revisit the "lenient-examiner-weaker-patent" channel using a Frakes-Wasserman-style leave-one-out within-art-unit examiner-leniency instrument on the 2020 USPTO PatEx-ECOPAIR application corpus (10,556,305 applications; 14,496 examiners meeting a ≥20-case floor) linked to the 2020 USPTO Patent Litigation Docket Reports dataset (96,965 cases; 49,773 unique litigated utility patents). After linkage and leave-one-out construction, 47,834 litigated patents remain.