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.

Estate PlanningElder Law

Elder Law and Long-Term Care: Medicaid, Nursing Homes, and Protecting an Aging Parent

Long-term care is the largest uninsured financial risk most American families face, and the rules that govern it are counterintuitive at every turn. Medicare does not pay for long-term custodial care. Medicaid does, but only after a strict income and asset test, a five-year lookback on transfers, and a promise that the state will seek repayment from the estate. This article explains the documents that must be signed while capacity still exists, what guardianship costs when they were not, how Medicaid eligibility and transfer penalties actually work, the spousal impoverishment protections that keep a healthy spouse from destitution, the federal rights every nursing home resident holds, what an admission agreement may and may not require, and how to recognize and respond to elder abuse and financial exploitation.

Casey Scott McKayJune 16, 202528 min read

Intellectual Property and TechnologyArtificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Artificial Intelligence Key Legal Issues: A Comprehensive Overview for Businesses and Legal Professionals

Artificial intelligence has moved from research laboratories into the operational core of businesses across every industry, creating a fast-moving legal landscape that spans intellectual property, products liability, data privacy, employment, antitrust, professional ethics, and regulatory compliance. This guide examines the key legal issues arising from the commercial development and deployment of AI: protecting AI through patents, copyrights, and trade secrets; the unresolved questions of AI inventorship and authorship after Thaler v. Vidal and Thaler v. Perlmutter; the landmark 2025 copyright rulings on AI training data; products-liability frameworks for autonomous systems; biometric and data-protection duties under BIPA, the GDPR, and the EU AI Act; workplace-discrimination risk from AI hiring tools under Title VII and the four-fifths rule; the professional-responsibility duties that ABA Formal Opinion 512 and Mata v. Avianca impose on lawyers using generative AI; antitrust exposure from algorithmic pricing; and the treatment of AI assets in transactions and bankruptcy. It reflects developments through early 2026, including the November 2025 USPTO inventorship guidance, the December 2025 federal executive order targeting state AI laws, and the EU's Digital Omnibus proposal to defer high-risk AI deadlines. It follows a single hypothetical company to make the doctrine concrete and is written for executives, in-house counsel, and outside practitioners alike.

Casey Scott McKayJune 16, 202562 min read

Intellectual PropertyTrade Secret

Trade Secret Protection Toolkit: Building and Defending a Confidentiality Program

This toolkit is a high-level roadmap and curated library guide for protecting a company's confidential information as trade secrets and enforcing those rights when they are stolen. It walks the full program life cycle: identifying and inventorying secrets, implementing the "reasonable measures" the law requires, papering relationships with NDAs and invention-assignment agreements, controlling access, managing remote work and cloud risk, disciplined onboarding and offboarding, incident response, and litigation under the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act and state Uniform Trade Secrets Act. At each stage it links the firm's articles and checklists alongside the controlling statutes (DTSA, UTSA, the Economic Espionage Act). It is written for in-house counsel, founders, HR and security leaders, and litigators. Read the roadmap, then follow the links into the operational checklists. The non-compete landscape is unsettled—treat reasonable measures, not non-competes, as the backbone of protection.

Casey Scott McKayJune 14, 202514 min read

TechnologyContract

Software Licensing Agreements

Software is almost never sold; it is licensed, and that single legal choice drives nearly everything that follows. This guide explains the difference between a license and a sale and why it matters under copyright's first-sale doctrine (Vernor v. Autodesk), then walks through the anatomy of a software license agreement: the license grant and its scope, exclusivity, field, territory, and term; the major commercial models from perpetual to subscription to SaaS; and the proprietary-versus-open-source divide. It then tackles the enforceability of clickwrap and browsewrap contracts (ProCD v. Zeidenberg, Specht v. Netscape, Nguyen v. Barnes & Noble), the heavily negotiated risk-allocation clauses (warranties, IP indemnity, limitation of liability), and the operational terms that quietly decide outcomes (maintenance and SLAs, source-code escrow, audit rights, assignment and change of control, and data and privacy). It closes with a negotiation-focused FAQ. The goal is a single resource a developer, a buyer, a judge, or a curious founder can all read and actually use.

Casey Scott McKayJune 14, 202542 min read

TechnologyPrivacy

Developing a Privacy Compliance Program

A privacy compliance program is the operating system that keeps a company on the right side of an exploding patchwork of data-protection laws. This guide explains how to build one from the ground up: governance and a privacy officer, data mapping, the legal patchwork (CCPA/CPRA, the growing list of state laws, GDPR, HIPAA, GLBA, COPPA, and FTC Section 5), privacy notices, consumer-rights request handling, vendor and data-processing agreements, impact assessments, security and breach response, training, retention, and documentation. It anchors the program to the NIST Privacy Framework and the Fair Information Practice Principles, and it threads in worked examples a layperson, a lawyer, and a judge can all follow. The aim is a program that is defensible on paper and real in practice. Treat it as a map, not legal advice for your specific situation.

Casey Scott McKayJune 12, 202538 min read

Labor and EmploymentHarassment

Workplace Harassment and Hostile Work Environment Claims

Harassment law is misunderstood in both directions. Employees often believe any unpleasant boss violates the law, and employers often believe a written policy is a defense by itself. Neither is right. This article explains what a hostile work environment claim actually requires, why the severe or pervasive standard is objective and subjective at once, and how the Supreme Court's decisions from Meritor through Oncale built the modern framework. It covers the Faragher-Ellerth affirmative defense in detail, including why it is unavailable when a tangible employment action occurred and why Vance v. Ball State made the definition of supervisor decisive. It then addresses retaliation, which is now the most frequently alleged claim in EEOC charges and which reaches conduct the harassment standard would not, and the expansion of protected characteristics after Bostock and of the adverse action standard after Muldrow. The second half is operational: the anti-harassment policy and complaint procedure that actually earn the defense, how to run an investigation, what to document, the recent federal statutes limiting arbitration and nondisclosure of harassment claims, and the administrative process from charge through right-to-sue letter. It closes with a worked example, checklists, an FAQ, and related reading.

Casey Scott McKayJune 11, 202525 min read

Intellectual PropertyTrademark

USPTO Trademark Classes: A Guide to the Nice Classification

A trademark is not protected for everything under the sun--it is protected for the goods and services you actually sell, and the USPTO sorts all of commerce into 45 standardized buckets called the Nice Classification. This guide explains what those 45 classes are, why two companies can share the identical name in different classes, and how class choices drive the cost, scope, and conflict profile of your registration. It tours all 45 classes in plain language, walks through the USPTO Trademark ID Manual, explains the dramatically reformed 2025 per-class fee structure, and shows how "coordinated" and related classes can sink an application even when the class numbers differ. It also clears up a subtle but crucial point of law--that classification itself is "strictly ministerial" and does not define your rights, even though it drives your fees and your search obligations. Worked examples follow a hypothetical company through real classification decisions. The article closes with common mistakes, a short FAQ, and links to the rest of mclaw.io's trademark library.

Casey Scott McKayJune 11, 202541 min read

LitigationLegal Practice Management

Hallucinated Citations, Rule 11, and Generative AI in Legal Filings: What Courts Are Actually Doing

In 2023 a New York lawyer filed a brief containing six cases that did not exist, produced by a chatbot he had asked to find supporting authority and then asked whether the cases were real. The resulting sanctions opinion became the most widely read order in American legal practice that year, and it did not stop the problem. Courts across the country have since sanctioned lawyers, referred them to disciplinary authorities, struck filings, and in a growing number of cases denied relief outright because the supporting authority was fabricated. This article explains what actually happened in the leading cases, why large language models produce citations that look correct and are not, and what the governing rules require. It covers Rule 11 and its safe harbor, section 1927, inherent authority, the ethics rules that apply including competence, candor, confidentiality, supervision, and fees, and the ABA formal opinion addressing generative AI. It then turns to practice: the standing orders and local rules courts have adopted, what a defensible verification workflow looks like, how retrieval-based tools differ from open-ended chatbots, what to do if a fabricated citation has already been filed, and how to supervise the people who use these tools. It closes with a firm policy outline, a worked example, an FAQ, and related reading.

Casey Scott McKayJune 10, 202525 min read

LitigationEvidence

Expert Witness Toolkit

Expert testimony decides most technical cases, and the fights over it are decided by rules rather than by science. A qualified expert whose report omits a basis is excluded. A methodology that is generally accepted but was not reliably applied to the facts is excluded. A disclosure served a week late is stricken. This toolkit covers the expert workstream end to end: deciding what experts the case needs and when to retain them, the distinction between consulting and testifying experts and what it protects, satisfying Rule 26 disclosure and the report requirements, preparing the expert for deposition, bringing and defending a Daubert challenge under the amended Rule 702, and presenting and cross-examining expert testimony at trial.

Casey Scott McKayJune 8, 202514 min read

CorporateRisk Management

Crisis Management and Business Continuity Toolkit

Most business continuity programs are documents rather than capabilities, and the difference surfaces at the worst possible moment. The plan describes a structure nobody has rehearsed, the contact list is two years old, the backup has never been restored, and the whole thing lives on the network that is down. This toolkit builds the capability instead: the business impact analysis that determines what must be recovered and how fast, the dependency map that finds single points of failure, the crisis structure that names who decides and with what spending authority, the communications and contractual notice obligations that must be extracted in advance, the technology and facilities and supply chain recovery capability, the insurance that responds and the gaps between policies, and the exercise regime that turns the document into something that works. It closes with the first four hours of a real event and with a note on keeping the program proportionate, because a thirty-person company needs a day of work a year rather than a program office.

Casey Scott McKayJune 7, 202513 min read

TechnologyInformation Technology

A History of Computer Law

Computer law was not handed down on stone tablets; it was improvised, decade by decade, as judges and legislators wrestled new machines into old legal categories. This narrative history traces the story from the first fights over whether software could be copyrighted at all (CONTU and Apple v. Franklin) through the long war over software patents (Diehr, State Street, Bilski, Alice), the rise and reinterpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (Van Buren), the DMCA, the twenty-six words that made the modern internet (Section 230), the Crypto Wars, the open-source revolution, the legalization of the electronic signature, the birth of data-privacy law, and the arrival of artificial intelligence. Along the way it explains each milestone in plain language for lawyers and non-lawyers alike. The aim is to show that today's hardest tech-law questions are the latest chapters in a very old argument about how to fit the future into the rules we already have.

Casey Scott McKayJune 7, 202535 min read

LitigationDiscovery

Responding to Requests for Admission Checklist: A Practical Checklist

Requests for admission under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 36 invert the usual discovery instinct: the greatest danger is not saying too much but saying too little. A missed 30-day deadline hands your opponent binding admissions automatically, and a reflexive denial of an obvious fact can cost your client the other side's attorney's fees. This checklist walks responding counsel through the disciplined process: calendaring the unforgiving deadline, choosing among the four permissible forms of response (admit, deny, qualified, and lack of knowledge after reasonable inquiry), making only the narrow objections the rule permits, handling document-authentication and application-of-law-to-fact requests, watching the conclusive effect of admissions, and avoiding the cost-shifting penalty of Rule 37(c)(2). Each step is paired with the reason it matters and the case law that decides admission disputes. The strategic skill lies in distinguishing the requests that must be contested from the ones that should simply be conceded.

Casey Scott McKayJune 5, 202510 min read