E-Seller Litigation Dropped in Q3 as Some Judges Began Enforcing Procedural Limits

RPX’s latest quarterly report shows that litigation from operating company plaintiffs went up by 4% in the third quarter of 2025, with filings increasing by 6% in Q1-Q3.

However, these data exclude another distinct category of litigation filed by a small group of design and utility patent owners targeting copycats and counterfeiters selling products online. RPX excludes such “e-seller” cases from analyses of district court litigation because they tend to follow a different dynamic compared to what one might consider the usual patent suit. These e-seller cases sometimes name hundreds of defendant entities, many of which may be merely online storefronts or aliases for the same ultimate parent. Also, plaintiffs primarily seek injunctive relief instead of damages, and their cases often end with the e-seller defendant’s failure to answer, followed by a default judgment.

This category of litigation is shown in grey below to illustrate its magnitude. As shown by the rightmost bar, e-seller litigation in Q3 2025 accounted for 672 defendants added, or 45% of all litigation during the quarter—a much smaller number than in recent quarters past. While the number for Q3 remains subject to the caveat about defendants potentially having multiple online storefronts noted above, the decrease could also be related to efforts by some judges to apply stricter procedural rules to e-seller cases. In the Northern District of Illinois, by far the top venue for such litigation, District Judge John F. Kness issued an August 8, 2025 order that decried the “deluge of Schedule A cases” (referring to the sealed “Schedule A” complaint attachments that name defendants in e-seller cases) in his and other districts, arguing that these cases work “only by stretching applicable procedural rules past their breaking point”. Judge Kness determined that because these cases routinely award preliminary injunctive relief without adversarial proceedings, involve widespread sealing, and rely upon improper mass joinder of defendants, the relief sought should be obtained “by other means”.

The District of New Jersey appears to be following Judge Kness’s lead. On September 25, Chief Judge Renée Marie Bumb issued an order requiring plaintiffs in e-seller cases to “plausibly plead allegations of personal jurisdiction”, including “some evidence of each defendant’s contacts with the forums” (emphasis in original)—stating that “[t]he law is well-settled that simply being an online seller on Amazon isn’t enough”. The order also limits each e-seller complaint to a “single defendant or group of defendants acting under the same operator”.

See RPX’s third-quarter review for more on some of the top patent litigation trends this year.