Abstract Patent litigation is an expensive legal process faced by many companies. To reduce the cost of patent litigation, one effective approach is proactive management based on predictive analysis. However, automatic prediction of patent litigation is still an open problem due to the complexity of lawsuits. In this paper, we propose a data-driven framework, Convolutional Tensor Factorization (CTF), to identify the patents that may cause litigations between two companies. Specifically, CTF is a hybrid modeling approach, where the content features from the patents are represented by the Network embedding-combined Convolutional Neural Network (NCNN) and the lawsuit records of companies are summarized in a tensor, respectively. Then, CTF integrates NCNN and tensor factorization to systematically exploit both content information and collaborative information from large amount of data. Finally, the risky patents will be returned by a learning to rank strategy. Extensive experimental results on real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.