Apple suffered more patent lawsuits than any other company last year

People always like to take a swing at those on top. Apple — the highest-ranked tech company in the Fortune 500 — faced more patent lawsuits in 2013 than any other company in the United States. Apple received 59 patent lawsuits last year — nine more than the next company, Amazon, according to a report by Lex Machina, a legal-analytics company in Menlo Park, California. It seems the entire tech industry is being chased by patent lawsuits. The top 10 most-sued companies for patents are tech giants, Lex Machina reports. AT&T, Google and HTC are next on the patent lawsuit rankings after Apple and Amazon. The number of patents doesn’t fall sharply after the first few either. The tenth company, HP, was listed as the defendant in 34 patent lawsuits last year; Google, No. 4 on the list, had only five more lawsuits (39 in all).