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.
Public Benefits Toolkit: Applications, Fair Hearings, and Overpayment Defense
Working templates for a public benefits case. It includes an expedited service request, a separate household statement that resolves the most commonly mishandled eligibility issue, and worksheets for the medical expense, shelter, and dependent care deductions that most applicants never claim. It provides a verification cover sheet, a change report letter that creates a record, a fair hearing request that preserves continued benefits, a case file request, and a budget worksheet audit for finding the agency's arithmetic error. It closes with a hearing summary sheet and exhibit index, an overpayment calculation challenge, a disqualification hearing response, work requirement exemption and good cause letters, and an appeal for an agency that simply will not act.
Public Benefits Checklist
A working checklist for food and cash assistance, from the emergency application to the fair hearing. It opens with expedited service and the application date that determines when benefits start, then covers describing the household correctly and claiming every deduction—including the medical expense deduction that is the most valuable unclaimed provision in the program. It includes the verification list, the reporting system question that prevents most overpayment claims, and the recertification habits that keep eligible households from losing cases. It closes with the week-one adverse notice response, hearing preparation, overpayment defense, and the work requirement exemptions that go unraised.
Identity Theft Response and Credit Dispute Checklist: A Practical Checklist
This checklist is the response sequence for identity theft and for a wrong credit report. It runs from the first hour through litigation preparation: freezing, securing accounts, documenting, obtaining the identity theft report, requesting blocks rather than disputes where fraud is involved, writing a dispute that survives a perfunctory investigation, handling specialty reports, tracking reinsertion, and building a file. Deadlines are flagged, including the four-business-day block requirement and the thirty-day reinvestigation period. Every step in it is free.
Auditing Your Website Tracking Stack: A Practical Guide
A tracking audit is a technical exercise with legal consequences, and it fails when lawyers ask for a list instead of watching what the site actually transmits. This guide sets out the audit as it should be run: capturing live network traffic across configurations, reconciling it against the tag manager, mapping every transmitted field, identifying sensitive-page exposure, verifying that consent gating actually works, and reviewing vendor contracts for the permission that decides the party-exception analysis. It then covers remediation in priority order, the governance program that prevents recurrence, and what to do when a demand letter arrives before the audit is finished. A worked audit follows one site from tag inventory through remediation and documentation. It also explains what the resulting record does in a wiretapping case.
Applying for and Keeping Public Benefits: A Practical Guide
This guide walks through applying for food and cash assistance, keeping the case open once it is approved, and fighting back when something goes wrong. It covers the application itself—how to describe your household so it is counted correctly, what to bring, and how to ask for expedited service when there is no food in the house today. It details every deduction that reduces countable income, including the medical expense deduction that quietly doubles benefits for older and disabled applicants and is almost never claimed. It then covers reporting rules, recertification, and the week-one response to an adverse notice: the deadline that preserves benefits, the case file request that usually contains the error, and how to prepare and present a fair hearing.
Tracking Pixels, Session Replay, and the Wiretapping Lawsuits Reshaping Adtech
A wave of litigation has repurposed statutes written for telephone wiretapping and video rental records to attack the ordinary instrumentation of commercial websites. This article explains how that happened: what a pixel actually does, why plaintiffs frame data collection as interception of communications, and how the party exception and its two-party-consent variations decide most cases. It covers the Video Privacy Protection Act's revival and the disclosure element that determines outcomes, the special treatment of health and financial contexts, and the statutory damages arithmetic that makes these cases valuable regardless of harm. It closes with what actually reduces exposure, which is tag governance rather than policy language.
Responding to a Licensing Board Complaint: A Practical Guide
This guide is the sequence for a licensee who has received a letter from a board. It covers what to do in the first forty-eight hours and why talking to the investigator is the mistake that decides most cases, how to preserve records and manage the parallel proceedings, how to write a response organized around the practice act rather than around your feelings, how to respond to a summary suspension and propose interim conditions, how to prepare a hearing including the comparable-case research that is the most underused argument in license defense, how to negotiate a consent agreement around the findings rather than the sanction, and how to petition for reinstatement.
Military Legal Toolkit: UCMJ Defense, SCRA Protections, and USERRA Claims
This toolkit collects the working documents of a servicemember legal matter: the rights invocation script and defense counsel request, an Article 15 mitigation statement and appeal, a separation board packet index with a character letter request, a security clearance response outline, SCRA letters for the interest cap, stays, lease termination, and unlawful repossession, a default judgment reopening outline, USERRA notice and return letters with a Department of Labor complaint outline, discharge upgrade and records correction application outlines, a medical documentation list, a DD-214 review checklist, and the deployment document package.
Applying for and Appealing Social Security Disability Benefits: A Practical Guide
This guide walks a Social Security disability claim from the decision to file through federal court, with the practical detail that decides outcomes. It explains how to complete the application and the function report without undermining the claim, what medical evidence to gather and in what form, how to appeal within the sixty day window and why appealing beats reapplying, how to prepare for an ALJ hearing including the two questions that most often win it, what to expect from a vocational expert and how to cross examine one, and how the Appeals Council and district court stages work. It covers onset dates, back benefits, fee agreements, expediting a case, and what to do about an overpayment notice.
Secondary Copyright Liability Risk Checklist: A Practical Checklist
This checklist turns a secondary copyright liability exposure review into phased, check-off tasks for online services and for the rightsholders evaluating them. It starts with preservation and a function map, then tests direct infringement, inducement, tailoring, and vicarious liability in the order the law now makes useful after Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment. It then checks section 512 eligibility, the handling of court orders and subpoenas directed at intermediaries, and contracts and governance. A separate phase gives rightsholders a pre-suit review of theories and evidence. Each item names its authority, with practical notes and red flags, and the document can be used printed on a desk.
Platform Liability Toolkit: Terms of Service, Notice Procedures, and Litigation Defenses
This toolkit collects the operating documents a content platform needs, from the terms of service provisions that determine whether the platform creates its own liability through the copyright infrastructure the Section 230 intellectual property carve-out makes mandatory. It includes notice and counter-notice procedures, a repeat infringer policy with the tracking that makes it real, moderation decision logging, a subpoena response protocol, a transparency report structure, a design review form addressing the product-defect claims, and a Section 230 motion outline. Each template is annotated with its purpose, its owner, and the failure it prevents. Each template carries drafting notes on how the provision performs in a motion to dismiss. Adapt everything to the service, the user base, and the content types involved.
Platform Content Moderation Checklist: A Practical Checklist
Platform liability almost always traces to the platform's own conduct rather than to user content, and this checklist is organized around that fact. It covers the terms that must match the process actually run, the copyright infrastructure the Section 230 intellectual property carve-out makes mandatory, notice-and-action workflows for every other complaint category, subpoena handling, transparency instrumentation, and the product design review that addresses the defect claims now driving platform litigation. Separate sections cover the hard complaint categories, minors, marketplaces, the annual review, and the diligence package an acquirer will request. It separates the policy layer, the operational layer, and the evidence layer. Every item is written so that a "no" tells you what to do next.