Reasons for Getting Involved in Litigation

There are a number of reasons that parties undertake litigation. For Plaintiffs, sometimes they do this in the hope that they will receive a substantial monetary award from the Court.  This is often a critical objective for many parties and potential litigants should get a sense from their counsel about how compensation might be calculated and what the possible range of compensation could be. However, there are some other significant reasons for getting involved in litigation.

First, in many intellectual property disputes, parties are concerned about protecting markets, either preventing other parties from accessing a market or ensuring they have access to a market.  These considerations around access to market may be hard to quantify and they may not be recognized (or compensated for) in a particular piece of litigation, but often they are the most important reason that a party is litigating.

Second, a Plaintiff may want the other party to stop doing something it is currently doing or do it in a different way.  Or, they may want to persuade an opponent that the costs of doing something are higher than the opponent had originally thought or the benefits are lower.  Litigation can help create all these situations.

Another significant reason for litigating is to create some form of precedent. Sometimes that precedent is to clarify the state of the law.  In other words, a party may want to establish that certain rights are available or certain defences are available. There is another type of precedent that is also important: whether a person assertively protects their rights or does not. Again, this can be a very significant factor in litigation, even if it is not reflected in monetary judgments awarded by a Court.