Learning to litigate: the relationship between past litigation experience and litigation outcomes in the Chinese intellectual property system

Intellectual property (IP) and the protection of IP is of increasing importance to firms’ competitiveness, and firms must be able to defend their IP when it is infringed upon. In most markets, IP and the defense of IP is a stringent legal process, but in developing markets and markets undergoing changes, this is not necessarily so. The Chinese IP system and protection is comparatively new, and the system is still under development. In this study, we analyze the relationship between firms’ previous litigation experience and litigation outcomes using a sample of 10,211 court cases tried in China between 2001 and 2009. We find that despite litigation being a rare event for most firms, plaintiffs’ prior litigation experience and especially prior successful litigation experience or experience with specific case types is related to their likelihood of a positive outcome. However, plaintiffs’ successful application of prior litigation experience is contingent on the type of litigation case.