WASHINGTON -- For tech companies, patent litigation is just a cost of doing business. The realistic goal is not to eliminate costs, but to contain them.

Here at George Washington University's law school, a parade of patent experts representing large corporations, law firms and academia gathered to compare notes on strategy and take stock of the state of the intellectual property landscape.

Points they agreed on: recent years have seen a sharp rise in the number of patent cases businesses in fields like IT and biotech are having to defend against, and those cases are increasingly brought by "non-practicing entities," known more derisively as patent trolls.

"In the old style of litigation where it was company versus company, every case was a little different," said Chip Lutton, chief patent counsel for Apple (NASDAQ: APPL). But in the new model of patent litigation, many of the suits are nearly identical, targeting related aspects of the same product. "We find a great deal of benefit if we go back to a law firm that's had a case against the product in the past," Lutton said, so Apple's legal team doesn't have to reinvent the wheel in producing a new set of intellectual property documents every time it faces a patent dispute.

"We often get a request that says 'give us all your documents on iPod.' Well that's a tall order for us," he said.

Lutton said that Apple is currently defending itself in 30 patent lawsuits, 13 of which have been filed since the beginning of the year.

For companies in the pharmaceutical industry, the increase in patent litigation is even more severe. Douglas Norman, vice president and general patent counsel for Eli Lily and Company, said his firm was facing five patent lawsuits in 1999. By 2004, that number had risen to 24. As of January of this year, Norman said Eli Lily was battling 432 patent suits, with most coming in overseas jurisdictions.

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Tuesday's event comes as a measure to reform the patent system, including significant revisions to the way cases are handled in court, is working its way through Congress. Identical versions of the Patent Reform Act were introduced in the House and Senate in March. After some revision, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the bill, sending it to the full Senate. Committee Chairman and co-sponsor of the bill Patrick Leahy on Tuesday submitted a report to accompany the legislation to the full Senate, calling on the majority leader to schedule a vote "as soon as possible."

The companion bill is still in a House committee.

Companies in the IT industry, which are most often cast as defendants in patent disputes, are major backers of the bill.

"The people pushing patent reform are the ones getting sued," said John Whealan, associate dean at GW's law school. Whealan, a former deputy general counsel with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, worked as an attorney for the Senate Judiciary Committee in the last Congress when the push for patent reform fell apart in the Senate after clearing the House.

For advocates of patent reform, Whealan said a single issue towers over the rest: "The unpredictability of the awards was really what was frustrating people."

The language relating to damages in the bill remains the most controversial point, with manufacturing firms like Corning and individual inventors maintaining that it would impose unfair caps on their ability to receive compensation when their intellectual property is misappropriated.

But critics of the current system claim that it's erratic, with damages awards fluctuating wildly depending on the venue and the manner in which the case is disposed. The Patent Reform Act would significantly reduce the number of criteria used to determine damages awards, which opponents of the bill say would serve only to effectively lower the cost of stealing intellectual property.

Mary Woodford, vice president of Cornerstone Research, presented a study her group conducted of some of the busiest patent venues in U.S. District Court.

Cases resolved by jury trial resulted in an average damages award of $21.6 million, compared to the average award at a bench trial of $3 million. Some districts were outliers, like the Eastern District of Texas, where a disproportionate number of patent cases are tried. The average jury-trial settlement in that venue is $54 million, according to Woodford, whose firm was a sponsor of Tuesday's IP symposium.

For the companies forced to defend their products against infringement charges often brought by "non-practicing entities," the seemingly arbitrary determination of damages awards is a vexing problem.

Martha Gooding, a partner at the firm Howrey LLP, which was also a sponsor of yesterday's event, said the erratic nature of damages awards often stems from confusion on the part of the jury, or from jury members swayed more by emotions than the legal criteria for determining awards.

"By the time jurors conclude you have infringed on a valid enforceable patent, they are in the mood to punish you," said Gooding. Ex-jurors in focus groups Howrey conducted often talked of granting steep awards as a way of striking a blow against "corporate greed," irrespective of the legal dictates for awarding judgments. "Often jurors equate infringement with theft or robbery, even when there's no evidence of copying," she said.

Other jury errors Howrey found include basing awards on the amount of gross revenue an infringing party was said to have earned from using the patent, rather than the net profits. Juries sometimes also tack on expenses like attorneys' fees, which the judge automatically adds to the award the jury turns in, leading to double payment, Gooding said.

She also cautioned that juries are commonly swayed by plaintiffs' efforts to inflate the significance of the patent in question. Gooding pointed to a prominent case brought against Hewlett-Packard by Cornell University, where the plaintiffs' attorneys characterized the invention in question as an entire server, which the judge said was more accurately stated as a "component of a component of a part of a piece of the server."

Update corrects language characterizing the pharmaceutical industry as a supporter of the Patent Reform Act.