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.
The Copyright Statute of Limitations After Warner Chappell v. Nealy: Discovery, Separate Accrual, and How Far Back Damages Reach
This article explains how far back a copyright plaintiff can reach under the 23 words of 17 U.S.C. § 507(b). It reads Petrella, Sohm, Warner Chappell v. Nealy, and Justice Gorsuch's dissent closely, then tracks what appellate courts have done since, including the Second Circuit's rulings on sophisticated plaintiffs and constructive discovery and the Supreme Court's refusals to take up the discovery rule. It separates infringement claims, which accrue again with each act, from ownership claims, which accrue once on repudiation. It explains what happens at the server level when an image stays online for years, why tolling and laches rarely rescue a late claim, and how registration timing limits the money even when the claim is timely. Worked examples cover a sampled 1983 song and an old blog photo. Lawyers, judges, rights owners, and accused businesses will each find the practical consequences spelled out.
Lateral Hire Toolkit: Candidate Certifications, Onboarding Instructions, and Cease-and-Desist Responses
This toolkit gives hiring companies and former employers working papers to copy for a competitor hire: a risk tier worksheet, recruiter instructions, an interview briefing, a candidate certification, offer letter clauses, a good leaver letter, a day-one instruction memo, a firewall memo, and an IT control sheet. It also includes the papers for a dispute, including an incident intake form, a quarantine protocol, an interview warning, a hold notice, a hash exchange protocol, a response to a cease-and-desist letter, and a set of indemnification questions. For the other side of the table, it provides a claim evaluation sheet and a demand letter to a new employer. Each paper states its purpose, owner, and timing, and is followed by drafting notes tied to authority. Bracketed text should be adapted with counsel for the jurisdiction and the facts.
Image Copyright Demand Response Checklist: A Practical Checklist
This checklist turns the response to an image copyright demand into ordered, check-off tasks, from the day a letter, portal notice, complaint, or Copyright Claims Board notice arrives to the day the settlement is signed and the image policy is in place. Each phase lists specific actions with the governing statute, rule, or case linked and a short practical note. The phases cover intake and calendaring, preservation and removal, verification of ownership and standing, the registration and Section 412 timing analysis, the license search, the defenses, any copyright management information claim, exposure calculation, insurance and vendor tenders, the first response and negotiation, the Board opt-out decision, early litigation steps, and the settlement and release. Red-flag boxes mark the points where responses most often go wrong. A deadlines table, a list of common failure points, and a short worked example involving a coffee roaster close the checklist.
Designating and Playing Deposition Testimony at Trial: A Practical Guide
This guide walks a trial team through designating, editing, and presenting deposition testimony in a federal civil trial, from the first transcript inventory to the moment a clip plays for the jury. It summarizes the governing rules (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 16, 26(a)(3), 30, and 32 and the hearsay, completeness, and impeachment rules of evidence) and the cases that decide recurring disputes about unavailability, counter-designations, and waiver. The core of the guide is an eight-step process with a countdown timeline: choosing live or recorded testimony, proving a Rule 32 route, cutting designations, exchanging and objecting, obtaining rulings, building synchronized clips, presenting at trial, and impeaching on the fly. It then covers recurring evidence problems, strategy for the designating and opposing parties, costs, and common mistakes. A worked example follows a commercial case from the designation deadline to the verdict, and the guide closes with an FAQ and practical takeaways.
Converting, Redomesticating, and Merging Entities: A Practical Guide
Changing an entity's state of organization or its legal form is now a routine filing in most states, and the mechanical simplicity conceals a set of consequences that can be expensive if unexamined. A conversion is a single document; the tax treatment, the appraisal rights it may trigger, the contracts whose anti-assignment clauses it may violate, and the licenses that must be reissued are not. This guide covers the four mechanisms available—statutory conversion, domestication, merger, and the older dissolution-and-reformation approach—and explains when each is appropriate. It then works through the approval requirements, the tax analysis for each direction of change, and the long list of downstream items that must be updated. It closes with a sequenced work plan and the errors that recur.
Expungement and Record Relief Checklist: A Practical Checklist
A step ordered checklist for clearing a criminal record. It runs the record gathering that must come first, the certified dispositions that every later step depends on, clean slate verification, eligibility analysis case by case including the interaction rules that limit how many records may be cleared, the outstanding court cost problem that bars more petitions than anything else, the filing package, discretionary petition contents, the hearing, and then the second half that most people never complete: distributing certified copies of the order to seven separate recipients, disputing background reports under the FCRA, and using adverse action rights in real time. Separate sections cover licensing, firearms, voting, and immigration.
Evaluating a New Civil Case: A Practical Checklist
Evaluating a civil case is the discipline of deciding, before you spend real money, whether a claim is worth bringing or worth fighting. This checklist turns that craft into ordered gates: clearing conflicts and papering the engagement, preserving evidence, building the proof matrix and pinning the burden of proof, scoring liability and damages as separate variables, testing collectibility, screening the threshold defenses that end cases before the merits, budgeting the fight and choosing a fee structure, and converting everything into a number and a settlement range through a decision tree and expected-value analysis. Each phase pairs the steps with the governing authority and the failure modes that catch even experienced lawyers. It is general information, not legal advice; statutes of limitations, jurisdictional rules, and damages caps vary by jurisdiction and change over time.
Brand Ownership Toolkit: Assignment Agreements, Founder IP Clauses, and Ownership Evidence Files
This toolkit collects the documents that prevent trademark ownership disputes and the documents used to resolve them, each introduced by its purpose, its owner, and when to use it, and each followed by drafting commentary tied to the governing authority. It begins with an ownership analysis memo outline, then provides a confirmatory (nunc pro tunc) trademark assignment with a goodwill recital, a founder IP assignment clause with a pre-formation contribution, a band partnership name clause, and a distributor agreement trademark clause. Further templates supply an ownership evidence file index, practical notes for preparing a recordation cover sheet in the USPTO's Assignment Center, a demand letter to a departing co-owner, and a settlement term sheet for surrender, transfer, and transition. The templates follow a running example involving a coffee roaster whose co-founder filed the trademark application in his own name. A deadline tracker, an FAQ, and takeaways close the toolkit.
Mastering Interrogatories: A Comprehensive Guide to Objecting and Responding in Civil Litigation
Interrogatories are written questions, answered in writing and under oath, that one party serves on another to develop facts, identify witnesses and documents, and pin down an opponent's contentions in civil litigation. This comprehensive guide explains the governing framework of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 33—the 25-interrogatory numerical limit and how courts count discrete subparts, the scope and proportionality limits imported from Rule 26(b)(1), contention interrogatories and their timing under Rule 33(a)(2), and the option to answer by producing business records under Rule 33(d). It examines the verification requirement, the rules for stating objections with specificity after the 2015 amendments curtailed boilerplate, and the most common objection types with model language. The article also covers how to draft definitions and instructions, when interrogatories beat depositions or requests for admission, the duty to supplement under Rule 26(e), motions to compel and the cost-shifting and sanctions regime of Rule 37, and the strategic deployment of interrogatories as both offense and defense—all illustrated with example interrogatories and model responses a practitioner can adapt.
Conducting Freedom-to-Operate Analysis for New Products
A company that launches a product infringing someone else's valid patent risks injunctions, ruinous damages, and trebled awards for willful infringement—so the responsible course is to assess that risk before launch through freedom-to-operate (FTO) analysis. This guide walks the entire process in plain language, following a fictional startup as it clears a mobile-payments app: distinguishing FTO from patentability, defining the product's technical scope, searching the patent landscape, triaging the results, reading and construing claims under Phillips and Markman, building claim charts, assessing literal infringement and the doctrine of equivalents, and weighing validity defenses under Sections 101, 102, 103, and 112. It explains how willfulness law after Halo and Section 298 make opinions of counsel valuable but optional, why a non-infringement opinion usually beats an invalidity opinion, and how privilege waiver, design-arounds, licensing, and patent-assertion entities reshape the calculus. It closes with how to document the work and communicate risk to decision-makers as a calibrated judgment rather than a false promise of safety.
Enforcing a Foreign Judgment in the United States: A Practical Guide
A judgment from a foreign court has no automatic effect in the United States, and there is no treaty that makes it enforceable. What exists instead is state law: most states have adopted a uniform recognition act under which a foreign money judgment is recognized unless one of a short list of mandatory or discretionary grounds applies, and once recognized it is enforced exactly like a domestic judgment. The analysis therefore proceeds in two distinct stages that practitioners routinely conflate—recognition, which is about whether the foreign court's judgment counts, and enforcement, which is about collecting. This guide covers the recognition standards and their defenses, the procedural routes to a domestic judgment, the different and easier rules for sister-state judgments and arbitral awards, and the collection work that follows.
Small Business Finance Toolkit: SBA Loans, Lines of Credit, and Guaranties
Small business borrowing is a sequence of decisions in which the terms that matter most are set before the loan documents arrive and are rarely revisited afterward. This toolkit runs the whole arc: diagnosing what kind of capital the business actually needs, comparing the products honestly including the ones that look cheap and are not, negotiating the term sheet where nearly all the leverage exists, understanding the SBA programs and their eligibility and structural requirements, reviewing the loan agreement and the personal guaranty, satisfying closing conditions and perfecting collateral, living with the covenants and the reporting, and handling a default before it becomes a liquidation. It ends with default and workout, where the guaranty, the collateral, and the personal exposure negotiated at the outset finally matter. A separate stage covers the guaranty itself, including the defenses a borrower's spouse or minority owner may still have.