Trademark Litigation Was Up 25 Percent in 2025. Before You Celebrate, Read the Fine Print.
Every year, IP trade publications release the litigation statistics with the enthusiasm of a chamber of commerce bulletin. For 2025, the trademark numbers look impressive: federal trademark filings up approximately 25 percent year-over-year, according to federal court data and analysis by firms tracking docket trends. Brand owners winning. Infringers losing. The system working.
Before accepting that narrative, it is worth asking what is actually driving the number — because the answer looks a lot less like robust trademark enforcement and a lot more like a structural echo of something that happened to copyright dockets a few years earlier, and that courts are still cleaning up.
The driver is Schedule A litigation. If you have been following along here, you know what that is. If not, earlier posts cover the mechanics. The short version is that a single trademark complaint can name hundreds of anonymous e-commerce sellers as defendants, sweep in TROs against their accounts before any of them know they have been sued, and generate settlements or defaults without any court ever ruling on whether the accused products actually infringed the mark. The cases are not designed to produce judicial decisions. They are designed to produce payments.
What they also produce, in volume, is filings — and filings are what the statistics count.
This is precisely what happened to the federal copyright docket, starting around 2017, when Strike 3 Holdings began its run as the most prolific plaintiff in the entire federal court system. Not the most prolific IP plaintiff — the most prolific plaintiff, in any category of civil litigation. By 2022, Strike 3 accounted for somewhere between forty and fifty percent of all copyright filings nationally. The copyright statistics looked like a thriving enforcement environment. What they actually recorded was the output of one company's litigation-as-business-model operation, structured entirely around settlement pressure rather than adjudicated rights.
The parallel to Schedule A is close enough that it does not need much elaboration. Different underlying law, different category of defendant — foreign e-commerce sellers rather than domestic BitTorrent users — but the same core dynamic: a high-volume model that generates aggregate docket statistics without generating proportionate legal development or genuine resolution of disputed commercial questions. The cases that would produce contested rulings on the merits are the ones that settle or default. The law of trademarks emerges from that churn largely unchanged, because the cases that would make law are the ones that disappear.
This matters for how to read the 2025 numbers. An increase in trademark filings that reflects brand owners winning harder-fought disputes against identified competitors means something. An increase that reflects one category of plaintiff filing high volumes of cases against defendants who cannot practicably respond means something else — something closer to a measure of the plaintiff bar's capacity than of trademark protection's vitality.
The 25 percent increase is real. The story it tells about the health of trademark enforcement in 2025 is considerably more equivocal.
Courts have been reaching the same conclusion, and the Northern District of Illinois has been the most direct about it. Judge Kness's Eicher Motors opinion broke the joinder theory that had allowed plaintiffs to bundle hundreds of unrelated sellers into a single action. Judge Blakey sanctioned a plaintiff's firm in Marshall Amplification for systematic judge-shopping — dismissing and refiling to avoid judges who had started asking hard questions about the TRO applications before them. Standing orders across the NDIL now require Schedule A TRO applicants to make specific factual showings about specific defendants rather than submitting the formulaic, one-size-applies-to-all-three-hundred declarations that courts had been accepting for years.
The comparison to Strike 3 holds here, too. Courts did not eliminate that model. They imposed friction — procedural requirements that made the mechanical processing of mass filings more expensive and more visible. The filings continued; the volume contracted at the margins; the economics of the model adjusted. Schedule A is at an earlier point in that cycle, but the direction is the same.
What does not seem to be adjusting is where the filings go when one venue gets harder. Forum migration is a documented feature of mass IP litigation, and it is visible in the Schedule A context. The NDIL was the preferred venue for years because it had developed a working practice around these filings and the TROs came readily. As the NDIL has become less accommodating, filing patterns show increased activity in other districts. New Jersey. Florida. Courts that have not yet developed the institutional familiarity with the practice that breeds skepticism. The plaintiffs are not abandoning the model. They are shopping for the version of the federal court system that has not yet read the same opinions the Northern District judges have.
That forum migration is itself a data point the aggregate filing statistics obscure. A 25 percent national increase in trademark filings that is partly explained by plaintiff migration out of a skeptical district is not evidence of growing enforcement vitality. It is evidence of enforcement infrastructure adapting to judicial resistance, which is a more specific and more interesting story than the headline suggests.
What the 2025 trademark statistics will probably look like in retrospect — once the Schedule A model has moved further through the same cycle Strike 3 has — is an outlier year, the way several years of Strike 3 filings look like outliers when you map copyright docket trends over a longer period. The number was real. The underlying dynamic was not a permanent feature of the enforcement landscape. It was an enforcement technology at peak adoption, before the courts had fully adapted and before the economics had fully adjusted to the procedural friction that was accumulating in the primary venue.
That is not a prediction that Schedule A litigation will disappear. Strike 3 is still filing, at volume, years after courts began imposing requirements that its original model was not designed to accommodate. The litigation infrastructure is durable even when the conditions that made it frictionless are gone. But the 25 percent increase in 2025 trademark filings will not compound. The judicial pushback is real and is producing standing orders and opinions that are not going away. The venue options outside the NDIL will not remain indefinitely naive about what Schedule A litigation looks like up close. And defendants who contest rather than default — a trend that cases like Bond-Bright Head, covered in an earlier post here, are beginning to support — change the economics of mass filings in ways that the default-and-settle model does not account for.
The smarter read of the 2025 trademark statistics is not that brand enforcement is 25 percent more vigorous than it was in 2024. It is that one category of plaintiff has, for now, found a litigation model that scales — and that the institutions designed to check that scaling are working through their response on a timeline that lags the filings. That gap, and not any surge in contested trademark disputes, is what the numbers actually show.
Jonathan Phillips is an attorney at Phillips & Bathke, P.C. in Peoria, Illinois. The firm represents those in Schedule A intellectual property litigation as well as Strike 3 Holdings cases. You can contact him HERE.