Insights

Analysis from the front lines of IP & technology law.

Our attorneys write about the developments shaping intellectual property — from the PTAB and the Federal Circuit to the practical realities of protecting fast-moving technology.

Intellectual PropertyTrademark

Drafting a Trademark Cease-and-Desist Letter Checklist: A Practical Checklist

A checklist for drafting a trademark cease-and-desist letter that stops infringement without triggering a declaratory-judgment suit or a public-relations backlash. It runs from clearing your own rights (priority, scope, registration status, honest likelihood-of-confusion assessment) through the strategic decision whether to send a letter at all, the section-by-section anatomy of the letter, the remedies that actually back the threats, the tone calculus, and the two great hazards: declaratory-judgment jeopardy under MedImmune and trademark bullying. WHY notes, trap warnings, a common-mistakes list, and primary authority are included. Educational, not legal advice.

Casey Scott McKayNovember 21, 20238 min read

CriminalWhite Collar

Anti-Money Laundering and the Bank Secrecy Act: KYC, SARs, and Beneficial Ownership Reporting

Anti-money laundering law asks businesses to do something genuinely unusual: to police their own customers on the government's behalf, at their own expense, and to do it quietly enough that the customer never finds out. The Bank Secrecy Act and its implementing regulations create the architecture — a written compliance program, customer identification and due diligence, transaction monitoring, and a reporting obligation that runs to FinCEN rather than to law enforcement directly. The Corporate Transparency Act extended a version of this into ordinary corporate formation, though its scope has narrowed considerably since enactment. This article explains who is covered, what each of the core obligations actually requires, where the criminal exposure lies for institutions and for individuals, and how the beneficial ownership regime now stands.

Casey Scott McKayNovember 21, 202325 min read

Intellectual PropertyPatent

Design Patent Toolkit: A Roadmap for Protecting How a Product Looks

This toolkit is a high-level roadmap and curated research guide for protecting the ornamental appearance of a product through U.S. design patents. It walks the full life cycle—from deciding what a design patent can and cannot protect, through drawings and prosecution, to functionality and obviousness after the Federal Circuit's en banc LKQ decision, the ordinary-observer infringement test of Egyptian Goddess, and the total-profits remedy of 35 U.S.C. § 289 as construed in Samsung v. Apple. At each stage it links the firm's articles and checklists alongside primary statutes, USPTO resources, and controlling cases. It is written for product companies, in-house counsel, founders, and litigators who need to navigate the field, not for a single discrete task. Use it to orient yourself, then drill into the linked deep-dive documents. Verify all fees and deadlines at the official USPTO site before relying on them.

Casey Scott McKayNovember 17, 202316 min read

Wills and EstatesTransfer Tax

The Federal Estate and Gift Tax: Exemptions, Portability, and Lifetime Transfer Planning

The federal transfer tax system taxes gratuitous transfers of wealth through three related taxes — gift, estate, and generation-skipping transfer — that share a single lifetime exemption and a common rate. Because the exemption is historically large, the system now reaches very few estates directly, which has shifted planning away from tax avoidance toward basis maximization for most families and toward aggressive lifetime transfers for the few still exposed. The mechanics that matter are the unified credit and its scheduled reduction, portability of a deceased spouse's unused exclusion, the marital and charitable deductions, and the generation-skipping tax that operates as a separate and unforgiving overlay. This article covers how the taxes fit together, the deductions and elections that shape most plans, the principal lifetime techniques and their risks, and the compliance obligations that follow a death.

Casey Scott McKayNovember 16, 202325 min read

LitigationDiscovery

Mastering Document Discovery: A Comprehensive Guide to Objecting and Responding to Requests for Production

Requests for production under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 34 are the workhorse of modern civil discovery, and the quality of a party's objections and responses often determines whether a case is won, settled, or sanctioned. This guide explains the scope of discovery under Rule 26(b)(1) and the transformative 2015 proportionality amendments, the strict response requirements of Rule 34(b)(2) including the duty to state whether documents are being withheld, and the courts' growing hostility to boilerplate objections. It covers electronically stored information in depth -- form of production, native versus TIFF, metadata, collaboration tools, ephemeral messaging, and technology-assisted review -- as well as privilege logs, waiver and protection under Federal Rule of Evidence 502, and clawback orders. The article also addresses the litigation hold, the meet-and-confer duty, Rule 37 sanctions, spoliation under Rule 37(e), and third-party subpoenas under Rule 45, with worked examples and model objection-and-response language. It is written so that judges, practitioners, and non-lawyers alike can follow the mechanics and the strategy of document discovery.

Casey Scott McKayNovember 15, 202352 min read

Real EstateCommercial Ownership

Real Estate Development Toolkit

Development is a sequence of options in which the developer buys time to answer questions before committing capital, and the failures are almost always a question answered too late. Title exceptions discovered after closing, an environmental condition found after the innocent landowner defense was lost, an entitlement the site could not obtain, a construction loan that funded before the equity was documented. This toolkit follows a project from site identification through disposition: structuring the acquisition with the diligence period and the deposit at risk, running title and survey and environmental review, obtaining entitlements, assembling the capital stack and the joint venture, financing and building, achieving stabilization, and exiting. Each stage identifies the decision that must be made before the next one begins.

Casey Scott McKayNovember 14, 202313 min read

CommercialAdvertising and Marketing

Advertising FAQs: A Guide for Small Business

This is a plain-English, deeply practical FAQ on U.S. advertising law for small businesses, founders, and the lawyers who advise them. It explains the bedrock rule that ads must be truthful, substantiated, and not unfair under Section 5 of the FTC Act, then walks through the doctrines that trip up real companies: the substantiation requirement, express versus implied and monadic versus comparative claims, the FTC's reasonable-consumer and "net impression" tests, the 2023 endorsement and influencer disclosure rules, native advertising, "Made in USA" claims, the Green Guides, deceptive pricing and "free" offers, bait-and-switch, and comparative advertising. It covers the laws that govern how you reach customers, including CAN-SPAM for email, the TCPA for texts and robocalls, the Telemarketing Sales Rule, COPPA for marketing to kids, and the negative-option and "dark patterns" rules for subscriptions. It addresses competitor disputes under Lanham Act Section 43(a) and the role of self-regulation through the National Advertising Division and its Fast-Track SWIFT process. Throughout, it flags where federal law ends and the fifty-state patchwork of consumer-protection statutes begins, and it gives concrete, worked examples a non-lawyer can follow.

Casey Scott McKayNovember 13, 202356 min read

Labor and EmploymentWorkers Compensation

Workers Compensation: The Grand Bargain, the Claim, and the Exceptions

Workers compensation is the oldest and largest no-fault system in American law, and almost nobody outside it understands the trade it makes. An injured worker gives up the right to sue the employer and to recover for pain and suffering; in exchange, benefits are paid without proving fault and without the delay of litigation. This article explains the bargain and everything that follows from it: what injuries are covered and the phrases that decide coverage, the benefit categories and how each is calculated, the medical control fights that dominate modern practice, the exceptions that let a worker sue anyway, the third-party claim that is often worth more than the compensation case, and the settlement mechanics. It is written for injured workers, employers, and the lawyers on both sides.

Casey Scott McKayNovember 12, 202328 min read

TechnologyInternet

Top-Level Domain Names: An Overview

This article explains what top-level domain names (TLDs) are and where they sit in the Domain Name System hierarchy, then maps the full landscape of generic, country-code, sponsored, and new gTLDs. It describes ICANN's governance role and the new gTLD expansion program, the registry-registrar-registrant chain, and how WHOIS data and the EU's GDPR shape investigations. The article details the trademark rights-protection mechanisms built into the gTLD system--the Trademark Clearinghouse, Sunrise and Claims services, the Uniform Rapid Suspension System, and post-delegation procedures--and compares the two principal anti-cybersquatting remedies, the UDRP and the federal ACPA, 15 U.S.C. 1125(d). It examines the unsettled question of whether a domain is property, analyzes how the USPTO treats TLDs in trademark applications including the Supreme Court's decision in Booking.com, and closes with practical guidance, worked hypotheticals, and an FAQ. It is written for judges, practitioners, and laypeople alike.

Casey Scott McKayNovember 10, 202347 min read

TechnologySecurities and Fintech

Regulation of Cryptocurrency Around the World

Cryptocurrency sits at the crossroads of money, securities, commodities, property, and software law, and the rules differ sharply depending on which token you hold and which border you stand behind. This article explains in plain language what crypto and blockchain are, then maps the fractured U.S. framework: the SEC and the Howey securities test (including the 2023 Ripple ruling and the conflicting Coinbase and Kraken decisions), the CFTC's commodity jurisdiction, FinCEN's anti-money-laundering regime under the Bank Secrecy Act, the patchwork of state money-transmitter laws and the New York BitLicense, and the IRS's treatment of crypto as property. It then surveys the rest of the world, from the EU's comprehensive MiCA regulation to the very different approaches of the UK, Switzerland, Singapore, and Japan, to outright bans in China and elsewhere, plus the rise of stablecoins (and the 2025 federal GENIUS Act) and central bank digital currencies. Because the 2024-2026 U.S. legislative landscape is moving quickly, the article flags what is settled, what is contested, and what is genuinely in flux. Worked hypotheticals translate abstract doctrine into concrete decisions a founder, investor, or compliance officer actually faces. Read it as a map, not as legal advice for any specific transaction.

Casey Scott McKayNovember 8, 202350 min read

CorporateBusiness Formation

Corporate Formalities and Veil Protection Checklist: A Practical Checklist

The corporate veil is not created by filing articles of organization; it is maintained by behaving as though the entity is real. This checklist covers what that means in practice, organized around the factors courts actually weigh when deciding whether to hold an owner personally liable. It starts with formation and capitalization, then covers the separateness practices that matter most in litigation: separate bank accounts, documented related-party transactions, signature blocks that disclose the entity, and contracts and leases in the entity's name. Later phases address governance records, state compliance and foreign qualification, the special problems of the single-member LLC, and the obligations that survive dissolution. A final phase covers what to do when a plaintiff has already pleaded alter ego.

Casey Scott McKayNovember 8, 20239 min read

CorporateCorporate Transactions

Buy-Sell Agreement Drafting Checklist: A Practical Checklist

A buy-sell agreement fails in a small number of predictable ways: a stale price, an appraisal procedure that can deadlock, a chain of options with no mandatory purchaser, and insurance nobody maintained. This checklist is organized to catch each of them at drafting, and to establish the maintenance discipline that keeps the agreement usable years later when it is finally needed. It covers structure, the full range of triggering events, the valuation mechanism and the discount question that generates most of the litigation, funding through insurance and installment notes, the surrounding governance terms, and the entity-specific provisions that differ between corporations, LLCs, and professional practices. It closes with the estate tax and funding questions that determine whether the agreement's price will be respected and whether the money to pay it will actually be there.

Casey Scott McKayNovember 5, 202310 min read