[pnw]

I've been through this multiple times. Plenty of good advice here about getting lawyers and getting your industry together to fight the suit in a joint action.

Having said and tried all that personally, I've usually got my lawyer to negotiate it down to a smaller sum of a few thousand dollars and paid it. It simply wasn't worth paying orders of magnitude more than that for a legal process in which the outcome was unsure and that would take years.

Did I like it? Hell no but it was the best possible outcome at the time.

The secret to a good negotiation is getting your lawyers to call them and basically plead poverty. If you don't have substantial revenue or assets in your corporation, the NPE isn't dumb enough to keep spending time chasing you. In my case they were suing massive multinational corporations and also tiny startups with the same sized lawsuit.

The NPE are usually some random inventor who sold their 90's era patent to some shitty lawyers, with an equally random person trying to 'negotiate' the settlements. It's better to let your lawyers deal with them than getting your hands dirty yourself.

[DethNinja]

If don't mind, could you tell how much revenue your company was generating while it was sued?

I assumed they wouldn't touch companies less than 100k revenue but if they do, I think I might want to get some patent troll insurance.

[pnw]

Pre-revenue startup.