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More than 20 years after the establishment of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), research has yet to explain accurately the new court’s impact on patent litigation, patenting, and inventive activity. To address this shortcoming in the literature, we analyze a novel data set that permits us to consider separately the issues of validity and infringement in comparing the tendencies of the CAFC with those of its predecessor appeals courts. Our analysis of district and appellate decisions spanning 1953–2002 yields a recasting of the “pro-patent” nature of the CAFC: while it has been significantly more reluctant than its predecessors to affirm decisions of invalidity, it has not been more reluctant to affirm “not infringed” decisions. Because of the CAFC’s tendencies, district courts have decided patents to be invalid significantly less often, patentees have appealed decisions of invalidity significantly more often, and infringement has become the more frequently decisive inquiry.

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This study measures the value of patents to firms and identifies factors that contribute to that value by observing the abnormal change in firms’ stock market values following court decisions. Firms lose 0.85% (about $19 million) of their value following a decision that one of their patents is “Invalid”, but only gain about 0.7% following a “Valid & Infringed” decision. The factors that that affect the expectations of investors as to the enforceability of patent rights are at least as important in determining the contribution of the patent to the firm’s market value as are characteristics of the patent. Most prominently, this confirms the substantial impact that the creation of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) had on the value of patents. After the creation of the CAFC, “Invalid” decisions resulted in a 0.7% (about $15.5 million) greater loss of firm value. Clearly, patents are more valuable because of this change in the legal landscape.