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.

Real EstateResidential

Buying and Selling a Home: Contract, Financing, Inspection, Title, and Closing

A home purchase is the largest contract most people ever sign, and it is signed under time pressure with an agent explaining the paperwork. This article explains what a purchase and sale agreement actually does, why the statute of frauds means the writing is everything, how earnest money works and when it is forfeited, what each contingency protects and what happens when one is waived, the difference between caveat emptor and modern disclosure duties, how title searches and title insurance actually protect a buyer, what the different deed types warrant, what RESPA and TILA require lenders and settlement agents to disclose and when, and what remedies exist when a deal falls apart. Written for buyers, sellers, and the lawyers who close these transactions.

Casey Scott McKaySeptember 19, 202429 min read

ImmigrationBusiness Immigration

Business Immigration Basics: H-1B, L-1, O-1, and the Employment-Based Green Card Path

Hiring a foreign national is a scheduling problem before it is a legal one, because every category has a queue and most of them are longer than a hiring manager expects. This article maps the system for employers and for the people they hire. It covers the main nonimmigrant work categories, starting with H-1B and the registration lottery that decides most technology hiring, then L-1 for intracompany transfers, O-1 for extraordinary ability, and the treaty and country-specific options that are faster than all of them. It explains the labor condition application and public access file obligations that generate most Department of Labor findings, and the portability rules that let someone change jobs. The second half covers the employment-based green card path: PERM labor certification and its recruitment requirements, the EB-1 through EB-3 preference categories, the national interest waiver, priority dates and the visa bulletin, and the choice between adjustment of status and consular processing, with a worked timeline, a compliance checklist, and an FAQ.

Casey Scott McKaySeptember 19, 202425 min read

Intellectual PropertyTrademark

TTAB Practice Toolkit: Oppositions, Cancellations, and the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board from Pleading to Appeal

This toolkit is a stage-by-stage roadmap through proceedings before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB), the administrative tribunal that decides the right to register marks. It compares oppositions and cancellations, then walks pleadings, ESTTA filing, mandatory disclosures, discovery, the trial (testimony) periods, briefing, oral hearing, and the two routes for review—appeal to the Federal Circuit or a civil action in district court. At each stage it links mclaw.io checklists and articles plus the governing rules (TBMP, 37 C.F.R. Part 2, 15 U.S.C. §§ 1063-1071) and the leading authority on preclusion, B&B Hardware v. Hargis. It is written for practitioners filing or defending Board proceedings and for brand owners weighing the TTAB against district-court litigation. Verify current rules, deadlines, and fees at uspto.gov before filing.

Casey Scott McKaySeptember 18, 202413 min read

Intellectual PropertyTrade Secret

Employee Departure Trade Secret Protection Checklist: A Practical Checklist

Employee departures are the single highest-risk moment for trade secret loss, and what a company does in the window between notice and last day often matters as much to a future case as everything it did in the preceding years. This checklist guides counsel, HR, and IT through a disciplined offboarding: triaging the risk level, securing return of company property and a written deletion confirmation from personal devices, revoking access across every system, conducting an exit interview that captures a signed acknowledgment of continuing obligations, sending a continuing-obligations letter with proof of delivery, and — where the departure looks suspicious — preserving forensic evidence the right way before it is lost. It explains the legal line between an employee's portable general skill and the company's protectable secrets, why the inevitable-disclosure doctrine is a poor foundation, and how clean offboarding builds the documentary record (access logs, signed agreements, the Section 1833(b) notice) that wins or loses the case. Each step is paired with the reason it matters and the evidence it creates, so the checklist doubles as a record-building exercise rather than a compliance formality.

Casey Scott McKaySeptember 16, 202410 min read

Intellectual Property and TechnologyPrivacy

Biometric Data Privacy Laws and Their Impact on AI Development

AI systems that read faces, voices, and other biometric identifiers have collided with a fast-growing body of privacy law that imposes strict written-consent rules and, in Illinois, statutory damages large enough to threaten a company's survival. This article explains that landscape in plain language and follows two fictional companies—a gym chain deploying biometric check-in and a facial-recognition vendor selling to enterprises—through the rules that govern them. It covers the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act and the litigation wave it unleashed, the 2024 amendment that defused the per-scan damages theory, the Texas Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act and the record $1.4 billion Meta settlement, Washington's enrollment-based statute, the spread of comprehensive state and local laws, and the European framework under the GDPR's Article 9 and the EU AI Act. It incorporates the EU's 2026 Digital Omnibus, which defers the AI Act's high-risk obligations while leaving the biometric prohibitions in force, and it closes with a practical, life-of-the-data compliance approach written for both developers and deployers.

Casey Scott McKaySeptember 15, 202445 min read

Intellectual PropertyPatent

Overcoming an Obviousness Rejection: A Practical Checklist

Obviousness under 35 U.S.C. § 103 is the single most common and most consequential ground on which patent claims are rejected. This checklist walks you through dismantling a § 103 rejection: confirming claim construction, testing whether the examiner actually made out a prima facie case (differences, a reasoned motivation to combine, and a reasonable expectation of success), and deploying the substantive rebuttals—attacking the motivation, negating the expectation of success, teaching away, non-analogous art, change in principle of operation, and the full set of objective indicia of nonobviousness with the all-important nexus requirement. It explains the KSR rationales and their hidden factual predicates, the role of Rule 1.132 declarations and examiner interviews, and the different burdens before the examiner, the PTAB, and the district court. The goal is to overcome the rejection while keeping claims broad enough to be worth owning.

Casey Scott McKaySeptember 14, 20248 min read

Intellectual PropertyPatent

What Constitutes Patent Infringement?

Patent infringement is, at its heart, a simple question dressed in intimidating clothing: does the accused product or process include every element of at least one patent claim? This article walks judges, lawyers, and non-lawyers alike through the full anatomy of an infringement analysis under 35 U.S.C. 271—from direct, induced, contributory, and divided infringement, to the all-elements rule, claim construction, and the doctrine of equivalents (with its Warner-Jenkinson and Festo guardrails). It explains literal infringement versus equivalents, the two-step infringement framework, and what makes infringement "willful" enough to triple the damages under Halo. It surveys the often-overlooked infringement varieties under Section 271(e), (f), and (g), the major defenses (non-infringement, invalidity, inequitable conduct, exhaustion, and licenses), the remedies a patentee can win, and the special role of the International Trade Commission for imported goods. Throughout, plain-English examples turn abstract doctrine into something you can actually picture, and links to deeper resources let you go as far down the rabbit hole as you like.

Casey Scott McKaySeptember 6, 202450 min read

Labor and EmploymentWage and Hour

Wage and Hour Law Under the FLSA: Overtime, Exemptions, and Off-the-Clock Work

Wage and hour law produces more employment litigation than every discrimination statute combined, and almost all of it is avoidable. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires a minimum wage and overtime at one and a half times the regular rate for hours worked over forty in a week, and it exempts a narrow set of employees who satisfy both a salary test and a duties test. This article explains how those pieces actually work: how to compute the regular rate and what must be included in it, why the salary basis test defeats employers who make improper deductions or pay a day rate, and why job titles are legally irrelevant to the duties analysis. It works through the executive, administrative, professional, computer, and outside sales exemptions and the highly compensated shortcut, including the Supreme Court's decision in Helix Energy v. Hewitt on day rates. It then addresses the off-the-clock claims that drive most litigation, including the Portal-to-Portal Act, donning and doffing, integral and indispensable activities after Integrity Staffing v. Busk, remote work, and the burden-shifting rule of Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery that punishes employers with bad records. Sections on recordkeeping, collective actions, liquidated damages, willfulness, and the state law overlay follow, with an audit checklist, a worked example, an FAQ, and related reading.

Casey Scott McKaySeptember 5, 202426 min read

LitigationMass Torts

Multidistrict Litigation and Mass Torts: How Thousands of Cases Become One Proceeding

Multidistrict litigation now accounts for a majority of the federal civil docket, and almost none of what happens in it appears in the Federal Rules. This article explains the machinery: how the Judicial Panel decides whether to centralize, what a transfer judge can and cannot do, how leadership is appointed and paid, how plaintiff fact sheets and census registries replace ordinary discovery, how bellwether trials are selected and what they are actually for, and how global settlements are structured and administered. It covers the doctrinal limits established by Lexecon and Gelboim, the general causation gatekeeping that ends entire litigations, and the ethical constraints on aggregate settlement that bind every lawyer with a book of cases.

Casey Scott McKaySeptember 5, 202428 min read

Intellectual PropertyIP Fundamentals

Copyright vs. Trademark vs. Patent vs. Trade Secret: A Practical Guide

"Intellectual property" is not one thing but four separate legal regimes—copyright, trademark, patent, and trade secret—each built on a different statute, protecting a different kind of asset, arising in a different way, lasting a different length of time, and tested for infringement by a different question. People confuse them constantly, and the confusion is expensive. This guide lays the four regimes side by side along six axes—subject matter, source of the right, term, registration, the infringement test, and remedies—anchored in the Copyright Act, the Lanham Act, the Patent Act, and the Defend Trade Secrets Act. It then explains the "channeling" doctrine that keeps the regimes in their lanes, drawing on Baker v. Selden, the Sears/Compco pair, and Dastar v. Twentieth Century Fox, so you can see not just how the regimes differ but why courts police the borders between them. A worked example walks one product—a smart fitness watch—through all four forms of protection at once. The piece closes with a decision framework, an FAQ, and practical takeaways for owners who want to map each intangible asset to the right tool.

Casey Scott McKaySeptember 5, 202438 min read

LitigationDiscovery

Responding to Requests for Production Checklist: A Practical Checklist

Requests for production under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 34 are the workhorse of modern civil discovery, and the quality of a party's response often determines whether a case is won, settled, or sanctioned. This checklist walks responding counsel through the disciplined sequence: docketing the 30-day deadline, issuing or confirming the litigation hold, mapping each request to a claim or defense, negotiating scope and an ESI protocol (including a Rule 502(d) clawback order), collecting and reviewing ESI defensibly, drafting request-by-request responses that object with specificity and — critically — state whether documents are being withheld under Rule 34(b)(2)(C), producing in the agreed format, and supplementing under Rule 26(e). Each phase is paired with the reason it matters and the traps that draw sanctions, anchored in the 2015 amendments and the case law killing the boilerplate objection. The goal is a clean, reasonable, well-documented process a court will credit.

Casey Scott McKaySeptember 4, 20249 min read

Labor and EmploymentPolicies and Procedures

Remote and Hybrid Workforce Toolkit

Remote and hybrid work raises two distinct sets of questions that companies routinely conflate. The management questions — how people collaborate, how performance is measured, whether hybrid schedules are coordinated — are real and are not legal problems. The legal questions turn almost entirely on one fact: where the employee physically works, which determines the applicable employment law, the payroll registrations, the workers compensation coverage, and frequently the company's tax nexus. This toolkit addresses both. It covers eligibility and approval, the approved work locations control and the reporting obligation that makes it enforceable, timekeeping and pay for remote non-exempt employees, equipment and expenses, home workspace safety, security and monitoring, accommodation requests, international work, and the performance and inclusion practices that determine whether the arrangement actually works.

Casey Scott McKaySeptember 4, 202412 min read