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.
Shareholder Derivative Litigation: Demand Futility, Special Litigation Committees, and Settlement
A derivative suit is a stockholder borrowing the corporation's claim because the board will not sue itself, and nearly every one of them is decided on a procedural question rather than on whether the underlying conduct was wrong. The plaintiff must own stock at the right times, must characterize the claim correctly as derivative rather than direct, and must either make a demand on the board or plead with particularity why demand would have been futile. This article walks through each of those gates, explains the universal demand-futility test Delaware adopted in Zuckerberg and how it changed the pleading exercise, covers the special litigation committee and the two-step Zapata review that follows, and addresses settlement approval, fee awards, mootness fees, and the preclusion problems created by competing plaintiffs racing to file. It closes with what defense counsel and boards should do in the first ninety days, when most of the outcome is determined.
Protective Order and Sealing Checklist: A Practical Checklist
Confidentiality practice fails in two predictable places: designations made without discipline, and sealing motions that assert protection rather than establishing it. This checklist runs both. It covers negotiating the protective order term by term, the designation standards that keep designations credible, an efficient challenge procedure, the Rule 502(d) order that clawback agreements cannot replace, and the document-by-document sealing motion that actually gets granted. Separate sections cover redaction, third-party material, trial, the access log, disposal, and what to do when someone moves to unseal years later.
Protecting Your Personal Information: A Practical Guide
This guide is the two-hour version of privacy protection, then the letters. It starts with the settings that do more than any legal request—credit freezes at the three bureaus and the specialty agencies, mobile account port-out protection, two-factor authentication, and the account access audit that closes the doors people forget. It then covers finding and removing yourself from data brokers, obtaining and disputing the consumer reports that decide housing and employment, and making state privacy law requests that carry deadlines. It closes with the surveillance situations that need care rather than speed, the breach and identity theft response ladder, and where to complain when a company will not respond.
Privacy Toolkit: Deletion Requests, Report Disputes, and Surveillance Responses
Working templates for personal privacy problems. It includes a data map worksheet and a freeze tracker for the highest-value protections, an opt-out log for the people-search removal cycle that has to repeat, and state privacy law request letters for access, deletion, correction, and opting out of sale. It provides the consumer report dispute letter that actually gets items removed, a matching furnisher dispute, an adverse action information request, and a tenant screening dispute with the specific arguments for mixed files and aged-off records. It closes with Privacy Act access and amendment requests, an evidence preservation and doxxing log, an identity theft block request, a regulator complaint, and an account access audit worksheet.
Personal Privacy: Data Brokers, Surveillance, and Your Rights Over Your Own Information
American privacy law is not one law but a patchwork, and the practical consequence is that your rights depend almost entirely on who holds the data and where you live. This article maps that patchwork in usable terms: the sectoral federal statutes covering communications, financial records, telecommunications, and consumer reports, and the comprehensive state laws that now give many residents rights to know, delete, correct, and opt out. It explains what data brokers actually are, why opting out works but does not stay done, and how the screening companies that decide housing and employment differ from credit bureaus. It also covers surveillance in the ordinary places it arises—recording conversations, cameras, location tracking, and devices installed by a partner—and what to do after a breach.
Personal Privacy Checklist
A working checklist for personal privacy, ordered by what actually protects you. It opens with the two hours that matter most—credit freezes at the three bureaus and the specialty agencies, a mobile port-out PIN, two-factor authentication, and securing the email account that is the master key to everything else. It covers the access audit that closes doors people forget, the people-search removal cycle that has to repeat, and the consumer reports that decide housing and employment and that almost nobody pulls before they are denied. It includes the state privacy law and Privacy Act requests, the surveillance situations where safety comes before speed, the breach and identity theft ladder, and a maintenance schedule.
Medical Bills, Surprise Billing, and Medical Debt: What You Actually Owe
An American medical bill is not a price. It is an opening position in a negotiation most patients do not realize they are in. This article explains where the numbers on a hospital bill come from, why the same appendectomy carries four different prices depending on who is paying, and what a patient actually owes as a legal matter. It covers the federal surprise billing protections and the independent dispute resolution process behind them, the good faith estimate rights of uninsured and self-pay patients, and the obligation of nonprofit hospitals to maintain financial assistance policies under section 501(r). It then follows the bill into collections, where the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and state limitations law govern, and explains why medical debt now behaves differently from other consumer debt on a credit report. It closes with judgment, garnishment, exemptions, and bankruptcy.
Contractor Dispute Toolkit: Contract Terms, Lien Waivers, Defect Notices, and Claims
This toolkit provides the worksheets, clause language, and letters that keep a home improvement project on track and resolve it when it is not. It includes a contractor screening worksheet with the eight verifications that prevent most disasters, a bid comparison sheet built around exclusions and allowances, clause language to insert into any contract covering scope, milestone payments, retainage, change orders, and lien waivers, a change order form, a notice of cancellation, the four lien waiver types with guidance on which to use when, a preliminary notice tracker paired with a payment and waiver log, a punch list, a construction defect notice drafted to satisfy state notice statutes, an abandonment demand, and complaint forms for the licensing board, the bond, and the recovery fund.
Appealing a Conviction and Seeking Post-Conviction Relief: A Practical Guide
This guide is the sequence for a person convicted and the family trying to help. It covers the notice of appeal that must be filed within days, how to order the transcript and assemble the record, how appellate issues are actually selected and why fewer is better, what an appeal can and cannot do, how to move from the direct appeal to state post-conviction without losing claims, how to investigate an ineffective assistance claim including obtaining the trial file and the police file, how to calculate the federal habeas deadline without losing the case to arithmetic, and how to find and work with post-conviction counsel.
POSIX and POSIX Standards: The Unsung Heroes of Operating System Harmony
POSIX (the Portable Operating System Interface, standardized as IEEE 1003 and ISO/IEC 9945) is the quiet bedrock that lets software move between operating systems. This article explains what POSIX is, how the IEEE, ISO, The Open Group, and the Austin Group maintain it, and how the Single UNIX Specification and the UNIX trademark fit together. It then turns to the legal questions a technology lawyer and a law firm should care about: whether the application programming interfaces a standard defines can be owned under copyright after Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., 593 U.S. 1 (2021); how standard-essential patents and FRAND commitments constrain patent enforcement; the antitrust exposure created by participating in standard-setting organizations; how open-source licenses interact with standardized interfaces; and how government procurement rules incorporate standards like POSIX. The goal is to make the legal connections explicit, accurate, and well-cited for both lawyers and curious technologists.
Negotiating an ESI Protocol and Managing E-Discovery Costs
Electronic discovery is where litigation budgets are consumed, and the decisions that determine the cost are made in the first sixty days by lawyers negotiating a document most of them have never drafted carefully. This guide covers the ESI protocol clause by clause. It starts with the meet and confer obligation and the proportionality standard that frames every dispute, then works through the scope decisions that drive volume: custodians, date ranges, and data sources, including the collaboration platforms and messaging applications that now hold the communications email used to hold. It covers search methodology, including keyword negotiation and technology assisted review, and the production format specifications that determine whether the received documents are usable. Later sections address privilege logging and the Rule 502(d) order that should be entered in every case, inaccessible sources and cost shifting, and the preservation failures that produce sanctions.
Negotiating a Protective Order and Filing Under Seal: A Practical Guide
Protective orders are negotiated early by people who do not yet know what the case will require, and sealing motions are drafted late by people who assume the designation does the work. Both assumptions cost money. This guide covers the negotiation term by term, the designation discipline that keeps designations credible, the challenge procedure from both sides, and the sealing motion that actually succeeds—with the document-by-document table and business declaration that separate a granted motion from a denied one. It includes an access log, a redaction protocol, disposal mechanics, and what to do when someone moves to unseal years later.