This study proposes a divergent expectation model for patent infringement disputes, where both litigation and settlement are driven by patent quality. Under the model, patent quality depends on both broadness and definiteness of the patent. The model predicts that technologies where the definiteness attribute can be estimated with high accuracy will have higher settlement rates. At trial, it is rather the assessment of the patent quality by the judge which decides the outcome. In its empirical section, the paper evaluates over a thousand hand-collected and hand-coded patent infringement and counterclaim decisions rendered by courts in the three largest patent granting European countries – Germany, France and the United Kingdom. [---]