Legal 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.
Cross-Border IP Litigation and Service Toolkit: A Roadmap and Resource Library for International Disputes
This toolkit is a high-level roadmap for litigating intellectual property disputes that cross borders, from assessing the dispute through service abroad under the Hague Service Convention (with special attention to China), establishing jurisdiction, managing parallel proceedings and forum selection, coordinating global patent and trademark enforcement, gathering evidence abroad, enforcing foreign judgments, and deploying anti-suit injunctions in FRAND wars. Each stage links to mclaw.io articles and checklists plus the controlling conventions, statutes, and cases, including the Hague Service and Evidence Conventions, 28 U.S.C. § 1782, PACER, WIPO, and Water Splash v. Menon. It is written for litigators, in-house counsel, and IP owners coordinating enforcement across the United States, China, Europe, and beyond. Use the narrative to orient and the resource links to execute. The toolkit flags traps in service on Chinese defendants and the unsettled state of anti-suit and anti-anti-suit injunctions in standard-essential-patent disputes. Verify treaty reservations, central-authority requirements, and timelines at the official sources before relying on them.
Administering COBRA and Group Health Plan Compliance
Group health plan compliance is administratively unglamorous and legally unforgiving, and COBRA is the part that generates the most litigation because the violations are documentary and uniform. A notice sent late, sent to the wrong address, or missing a required element supports statutory penalties per day per beneficiary, and the same defective template goes to everyone. This guide covers COBRA end to end: who is covered, what events trigger continuation, how long it lasts, the four notices and their deadlines, premiums and termination, and how the requirements interact with Medicare, severance, and the Affordable Care Act marketplace. It then covers the surrounding group health plan obligations that share the same administrative infrastructure, from ERISA documents and reporting through the newer transparency and fee disclosure rules.
White-Collar Criminal Investigations: Grand Jury Subpoenas, Internal Investigations, and Corporate Cooperation
A federal white-collar investigation announces itself in one of a few ways—a grand jury subpoena to the company, an agent at an employee's front door on a Saturday morning, a target letter, or a call from a prosecutor who is being unusually polite. What the company does in the first two weeks shapes everything that follows, because the decisions about preservation, privilege, employee interviews, and whether to self-disclose are made before anyone knows what happened. The single most consequential structural fact is that the company and its employees have interests that will diverge, often sharply, and the Upjohn warning that acknowledges this is both an ethical obligation and the thing that makes an employee stop talking. This article walks the anatomy of an investigation from the first subpoena through charging, cooperation credit, and resolution, with attention to the decisions that are genuinely reversible and the ones that are not.
Section 1983 Civil Rights Litigation: Color of Law, Monell, and Qualified Immunity
Section 1983 is the statute that lets a person sue a government official for violating the Constitution, and almost every difficult question in the field is about who can be sued rather than what was done. This article works through the architecture: the color of law requirement, the individual capacity claim and the qualified immunity defense that dominates it, municipal liability under Monell and why respondeat superior does not apply, the Eleventh Amendment and the Ex parte Young workaround, and the fee shifting provision that makes the whole enterprise economically possible. It covers the most litigated claim types, the Heck bar that traps claims arising from arrests, and the practical realities of damages and settlement.
Consumer Health Data Compliance Checklist: A Practical Checklist
This checklist runs a full compliance review of a product or business that handles health-related data outside, or partly outside, HIPAA. It moves in phases through scope and privilege, the HIPAA boundary, applicable state and federal law, traffic capture, ad-tech, consent, public statements, vendors, sale, consumer rights, security, location, breach decisions, legal process, special data categories, litigation readiness, and recurring governance. Each task names its authority, with notes on how the requirement works in practice and red flags that should stop the review and bring in counsel. It reflects the law as of November 2026, including the FTC's 2026 actions and the 2026 appellate decisions on health pixels.
Damage Statistics: Administrative and Government Litigation
Suing the government is not like suing your neighbor. Before a dollar of damages is on the table, the plaintiff must find a statute in which the sovereign has consented to be sued, and each consent statute comes with its own ceiling, its own forum, and its own list of things it will not pay for. This guide maps the damages landscape across the major vehicles: the Federal Tort Claims Act, the Tucker Act and the Court of Federal Claims, Section 1983 civil-rights suits and the qualified-immunity wall, Bivens claims, Fifth Amendment takings, the Administrative Procedure Act (which buys you an injunction, not a check), and the Equal Access to Justice Act fee-shifting statute. It explains how damages are proven and capped when the defendant is a government, why honest "average award" numbers are hard to come by, and how a careful lawyer values a case against a public defendant. The hard figures the input promised do not exist in any reliable public dataset, so this article frames ranges and sources honestly rather than inventing verdict statistics.
Children's and Student Privacy Toolkit: COPPA, FERPA, and Age-Appropriate Design
Three separate regimes govern data about young people, and they ask different questions. COPPA regulates collection from children under thirteen and answers with parental consent. FERPA and the state student privacy statutes regulate education records and answer with school control and use restrictions. The design codes and the minor provisions of state privacy statutes regulate the product experience for all minors and answer with defaults, regardless of what anyone consented to. This toolkit runs all three in sequence, from the audience analysis and data inventory through consent, retention and deletion, school-context obligations, design defaults, age assurance, and the international rules that make a single thirteen-year-old age gate insufficient for a global service.
Citizens United v. FEC and the Future of Federal Campaign Finance Reform
Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), held that the government may not ban independent political spending by corporations and unions, treating such expenditures as protected First Amendment speech. This article tells the story of how a documentary about Hillary Clinton became the most consequential campaign-finance decision in a generation, and traces the doctrine from Buckley v. Valeo through McConnell, Austin, SpeechNow, and McCutcheon. It explains, in plain language, the difference between contributions and expenditures, how Super PACs were born, and why "dark money" flows through 501(c)(4) nonprofits. It lays out the competing arguments of the Kennedy majority and the Stevens dissent without taking sides, then surveys the reform proposals that followed: the DISCLOSE Act, a constitutional amendment, public financing, and tighter coordination rules. The goal is a balanced, nonpartisan map of where federal campaign finance law stands and where it might go.
Insurance Program Review Checklist: A Practical Checklist
An insurance program is a portfolio of contracts that most companies renew rather than review, tracking a business that has changed and a set of contractual promises nobody has read against it. The gap between what a company promised its landlord, its customers, and its lenders and what its program actually provides is the most common uninsured exposure in commercial practice, and it is found by reading two stacks of paper against each other once a year. This checklist runs that review: inventory the exposures including the dependency map that sizes business interruption, extract every contractual insurance requirement, then work line by line through the coverages, the valuation and sublimit provisions that determine what a claim pays, the claims-made mechanics, and the broker relationship and renewal calendar. It closes with the broker relationship, the documentation practices, and the renewal calendar that make the review repeatable rather than heroic.
Regulation D Private Placement Checklist: A Practical Checklist
A private placement exemption is not a form you file; it is a set of conditions you must satisfy before the first offer goes out, and most failures happen in the first week of an offering rather than at closing. This checklist walks the decision that governs everything else, which is whether the offering will use general solicitation, and then the requirements that follow from it: accredited investor status and the verification standard that applies under Rule 506(c), the bad actor inquiry, integration analysis, and the disclosure obligations that exist whether or not a private placement memorandum is required. Later phases cover the closing mechanics, the Form D and state notice filings, transfer restrictions and legends, and the ongoing obligations that continue long after the money arrives. Used before the first conversation with an investor, it prevents the two failures that cannot be cured after the fact: an inadvertent general solicitation and a verification file that was never built.
Privacy and Data Protection Toolkit: Building and Running a Privacy Program
This toolkit is a roadmap for building, running, and defending a privacy and data-protection program in the United States and across borders. It walks the program life cycle: mapping and inventorying personal data, standing up governance, providing notices and obtaining consent, minimizing and retiring data, and complying with the sectoral and state-law patchwork (HIPAA, GLBA, COPPA, CCPA/CPRA), the GDPR and international transfer rules after Schrems II, and biometric statutes. It closes with breach and incident response and vendor management. Each stage links to mclaw.io checklists and articles plus the controlling statutes, regulators, and leading authorities. It is written for privacy counsel, compliance leads, founders, and product teams who need both a strategic overview and the operative rule for each step.
Patent Venue After TC Heartland: Regular and Established Places of Business, Foreign Defendants, and Transfer
This article explains where a patent owner may sue and when an accused infringer can make the case move. It traces 28 U.S.C. § 1400(b) from the 1897 statute through Fourco, VE Holding, and TC Heartland, then reads the Federal Circuit's cases on home offices, servers, call centers, dealerships, and corporate affiliates closely. It covers the burden of proof, waiver, the rule that foreign defendants have no venue defense, Hatch-Waxman venue, and the unresolved split over whether one step of a method claim is enough. It then turns to section 1404(a) transfer, the mandamus decisions that reshaped Waco and Marshall, random assignment, and the state of the Fifth Circuit's convenience test. Worked hypotheticals show how the rules play out for remote workforces, cloud deployments, and foreign parents with American subsidiaries.