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.
Unemployment Insurance Toolkit: Separation Evidence, Hearings, and Overpayments
This toolkit provides the working papers of an unemployment claim for both sides: the request for a written reason for separation, separation statement templates for discharge and quit, the alternative base period and employment status requests, an employer response template, a fact-finding preparation sheet, work search and earnings logs, the appeal letter, subpoena and exhibit tools, a hearing outline with cross-examination scripts, the board of review argument, and the overpayment, fraud, waiver, and repayment letters. Each is annotated with the rule it invokes. State forms and deadlines vary, so adapt before filing.
Admiralty Toolkit: Jones Act Claims, Limitation Actions, Liens, and Cargo Disputes
This toolkit collects the working documents of an admiralty matter: a crew injury statement and accident report correction, a seaman status evidence request, maintenance and cure demand and termination challenge letters, an evidence preservation letter and vessel inspection request, limitation action claim and privity discovery outlines, cargo notice of claim and joint survey requests with an extension agreement and package limitation analysis, a verified in rem complaint outline with an arrest checklist and letter of undertaking, a vessel purchase lien affidavit, a charter party clause review sheet, a casualty response memorandum, and a deadline calendar.
AI Licensing Toolkit: Data Provenance Records, License Terms, and Indemnity Clauses
This toolkit collects the working documents of an artificial intelligence licensing practice: the provenance manifest that makes every other protection possible, the clause library covering training rights, output ownership, indemnity conditions and model survival, the model and corpus inventory that keeps compliance current, and the intake and diligence materials that route deals correctly. Each template is annotated with its purpose, its owner, and the specific failure it prevents. The clauses are drafted from both sides so a negotiator can see the position being taken and the position likely to be taken back. Each template carries drafting notes on the allocation of training-data risk and output ownership. Adapt everything to the model, the data, and the deployment.
Making or Responding to a Time-Limited Policy-Limits Demand: A Practical Guide
This guide walks through a time-limited policy-limits demand from both sides of the table, step by step. For the claimant's lawyer, it covers confirming coverage and limits, building the evaluation package, quantifying liens, choosing between pre-suit and post-suit timing, drafting to the governing statute, setting deadlines and conditions, delivering the demand, and managing the response period. For the insurer, it covers logging and acknowledging the demand, checking coverage, notifying the insured, evaluating the claim under the correct legal standard, asking for information or more time without making a counteroffer, and accepting, tendering, or rejecting with written reasons, including in multiple-claimant cases. Separate steps address the obligations of defense counsel and the choices facing the insured, and a final step covers what happens after a demand expires. A timeline and cost table, a worked example involving a cyclist and a landscaping company's pickup, common mistakes, an FAQ, and takeaways close the guide.
IRS Tax Controversy: Audits, Appeals, Collection Due Process, and the Tax Court
A federal tax dispute moves through a defined sequence of stages, and the options available to a taxpayer narrow at each one. Examination produces a proposed adjustment, an administrative appeal offers the only forum authorized to settle on litigation risk rather than the merits alone, and a statutory notice of deficiency opens a ninety-day window that is the last chance to litigate without first paying the tax. Collection is a parallel track with its own due process protections, its own deadlines, and its own set of resolution alternatives. This article maps the stages, explains what each forum can and cannot do, and covers the penalty defenses, relief provisions, and limitations rules that determine outcomes more often than the substantive tax law does.
Getting Released Before Trial: A Practical Guide
This guide is the sequence for a person arrested and the family trying to get them out. It covers what to do in the first hours including the phone calls that must not be made, how to build the release package that actually decides detention hearings, what happens at the pretrial services interview and what to say in it, how to prepare for and argue a detention hearing, how to read a bail bond contract before signing it, how to handle conditions that cannot be met, what to do about a missed court date, and how to reopen or seek review of a detention order when the first hearing goes badly.
AI Licensing Diligence Checklist: A Practical Checklist
Artificial intelligence diligence fails when it asks for representations instead of documents, and when it treats a three-layer asset as a single license. This checklist separates the data, model, and output layers and runs each through the questions that produce usable answers. It covers provenance verification, chain of title, personal information and regulated data, model license restrictions that engineering teams routinely miss, indemnity conditions tested against the actual deployment, and the termination provisions that determine whether a trained model survives. Separate sections cover transaction diligence, vendor intake, and the ongoing inventory that keeps the answers current.
Negotiating an AI Data or Model License: A Practical Guide
Negotiating for artificial intelligence assets fails in predictable ways: the parties license a single undifferentiated thing, the licensor warrants rights it cannot document, and nobody addresses what happens to a trained model when the data license ends. This guide walks through the negotiation in the order that surfaces those problems early. It covers scoping the three layers, running diligence that produces documents rather than assurances, drafting the grant so training, fine-tuning, and evaluation are named separately, negotiating indemnity conditions rather than indemnity grants, and resolving termination before signature. It includes positions for each side, a term sheet, and the escalation points worth walking away over.
Mental Health Law: Civil Commitment, Capacity, and the Right to Treatment
Mental health law sits at the junction of two things the legal system is bad at holding at once: a person's liberty and a person's illness. This article explains how involuntary civil commitment actually works, from the emergency hold through the probable cause hearing to the extended commitment order, and why the constitutional floor set by O'Connor v. Donaldson and Addington v. Texas is both real and thinner than people assume. It covers the separate question of forced medication, where Washington v. Harper and Sell v. United States govern, and the criminal-side doctrines of competency to stand trial and insanity acquittee confinement. It examines capacity as a legal concept that is decision-specific rather than global, and surveys the alternatives to guardianship that have grown up around that insight. It closes on the integration mandate of Olmstead v. L.C., the confidentiality rules that govern mental health records, and the protection and advocacy system most people have never heard of.
Water Right and Permitting Checklist: A Practical Checklist
This checklist covers water rights from purchase diligence through adjudication. It runs the five threshold questions that identify which system you are in, the diligence sequence for buying land with water, the application and perfection steps for a new appropriation, the annual documentation habit that defeats forfeiture, the transfer sequence built around historical consumptive use, the protest and curtailment responses with their short deadlines, the general adjudication steps including the statement of claim deadline that can extinguish a right, and the separate physical permitting required for work in a waterway.
Licensing Data and Models for Artificial Intelligence: Training Rights, Outputs, and Indemnities
Licensing for artificial intelligence looks like software licensing and is not, because the asset has three layers that behave differently: the data, the model, and the outputs. This article separates them and explains what each layer's owner can and cannot grant. It covers the rights actually needed to train lawfully, the difference between an open weight release and open source, why output ownership provisions are more contract than copyright, and the indemnity structures that allocate the risks nobody can eliminate. It also addresses provenance documentation, the contractual layer that operates independently of copyright, and the practical questions of retention, deletion, and what happens to a model when the license to its training data ends.
Sponsoring a Family Member for Permanent Residence: A Practical Guide
This guide walks a sponsor and a beneficiary through a family-based case from the screening that should happen before anything is filed to the removal of conditions two years after the green card. It covers determining the category and the wait, assembling relationship evidence that will still be persuasive in a decade, and the admissibility screen that decides whether the case is straightforward or needs a waiver strategy. It explains the adjustment-versus-consular decision in operational terms, walks through the National Visa Center stage that stalls most consular cases, and covers the affidavit of support, the medical examination, and the interview. It ends with requests for evidence, denials, and the conditional residence deadline that terminates status when it is missed.