One way we can measure a company’s “evilness” is by how important litigation is to corporate strategy. We’ll open this series by comparing today’s three tech giants: Microsoft, Google, and Apple. Which company gets sued the most? And more importantly, which company sues others the most?
To find out, I wrote a perl script called the litig-o-meter that searches google scholar for lawsuits involving specific companies. It graphs how many cases the companies have been involved in every year; whether those cases were at the circuit, appellate, or supreme court level; and whether the company was the plaintiff or the defendant. Essentially, it does a search for “allintitle: [company name]” of federal court cases and interprets the results. It’s not yet ready for public release, but the results so far are fascinating.