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.
Domestic Violence and Protective Orders: Safety Planning and the Legal System
Domestic violence law sits at the intersection of criminal law, family law, housing law, immigration law, and firearms regulation, and a person in danger usually has to navigate all of them at once. This article explains what conduct qualifies, how the civil protective order system works from the emergency ex parte order through the full hearing, what a protective order can actually order, how the federal full faith and credit provision makes an order portable across state lines, how the firearms prohibitions operate after United States v. Rahimi, why Castle Rock v. Gonzales means an order is not self enforcing, how criminal cases proceed when a victim does not want to testify, and what housing, employment, and immigration protections exist alongside the order.
Building a Trade Secret Defense From the First Demand Letter: A Practical Guide
This guide walks an accused company, employee, and their counsel through a trade secret dispute in the order the decisions actually arrive, from the first hour after a demand letter to post-verdict motions. It covers the litigation hold, privileged fact finding, who should represent whom, how to answer the letter, how to force identification of the claimed secret, and how to assemble independent development and public domain evidence. Later steps address pleadings and Rule 11, preliminary injunction oppositions, discovery traps such as attorneys' eyes only limits on your own engineers, summary judgment, trial preservation, and bad-faith fee motions. Each stage names who does the work, the realistic trade-offs, and sample language. Two worked hypotheticals and a common mistakes section show how the steps fit together, and a short section explains how the same dispute looks from the plaintiff's chair.
Taking and Defending a Remote Deposition: A Practical Guide
This guide walks both the examining lawyer and the defending lawyer through a remote video deposition in federal civil litigation, from the decision to proceed remotely to the certified transcript and video. It begins with the threshold choices: whether to proceed remotely or in a hybrid format, who will be in the witness's room, which platform and recording method to use, how exhibits will be shown, and whether the witness is located abroad. Thirteen numbered steps then cover authorization, the written protocol, the notice or subpoena, the officer and vendors, exhibit preparation, witness preparation, the technology rehearsal, the opening record, conducting the examination, defending it, handling disputes and suspected coaching, closing the record, and the special rules for witnesses in other countries. Each step explains what to do, why, the governing authority, the common pitfalls, and timing. A timeline and cost table, a worked example that follows one remote deposition from notice to errata, common mistakes, an FAQ, and practical takeaways close the guide.
Drafting a Demand Letter: A Practical Checklist
A demand letter is the cheapest and often most effective tool in pre-litigation practice, but a careless one can damage a case or expose the sender to liability. This checklist walks through assessing the claim and the legal landmines before you write, assembling the eight load-bearing components of an effective letter, staying on the safe side of Federal Rule of Evidence 408 and the extortion line, complying with the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act when collecting a consumer debt, triggering and honoring the duty to preserve evidence, checking for required statutory and contractual pre-suit demands, and proving delivery. It pairs each step with the governing authority and flags the single most important caution: never threaten criminal charges to extract a civil payment. It is general information, not legal advice; the law varies by jurisdiction.
Damage Statistics: Contract Litigation
When a contract is broken, the law's first instinct is not to punish the breaching party but to make the injured party whole—to give them the benefit of the bargain they were promised. This guide explains how courts actually compute contract damages, from the foundational rule of Hadley v. Baxendale through the Uniform Commercial Code's sale-of-goods formulas, liquidated-damages clauses and the penalty bar, the duty to mitigate, the new-business rule for lost profits, and the limited availability of specific performance. It walks through the differences among expectation, reliance, and restitution measures, explains why punitive damages almost never appear in contract cases, and shows how attorney's-fee shifting works. It also looks honestly at "damage statistics"—what aggregate figures can and cannot tell you, why the overwhelming majority of cases settle before any number is entered, and how to read median-award data without being misled. Worked hypotheticals featuring clearly labeled parties illustrate each measure. The article closes with a FAQ and a plain-language disclaimer.
Building a Generative AI Use Policy That Protects Trade Secrets: A Practical Guide
This guide walks a company's legal, security, and business leads through building a generative AI use policy, step by step, so that it actually protects trade secrets and holds up as evidence of reasonable measures under the Defend Trade Secrets Act and state law. It begins with the threshold decisions (ban or enable, who owns the program, which data and people are in scope) and then covers twelve steps: assembling the team, discovering current AI use, classifying data, reviewing and approving tools, building a tiering matrix, deploying technical controls such as single sign-on, data loss prevention, logging, and agent restrictions, drafting the policy, updating contracts, training and certifying employees, responding to prompt-leakage incidents, auditing, and preparing for litigation. Each step explains what to do, why it matters, the governing authority, common pitfalls, timing, and cost. Separate sections address employees and contractors, counterparties whose information the company holds, and the labor-law and whistleblower limits on confidentiality rules. A timeline and cost table, an extended worked example involving a specialty coatings manufacturer, common mistakes, an FAQ, and takeaways close the guide.
Jury Selection and Voir Dire Checklist: A Practical Checklist
Voir dire exists to identify the people who cannot be fair to your client and to build a record supporting their removal, and almost everything else lawyers do in jury selection is a distraction from that. This checklist sets the preparation sequence—learning the judge's format, deciding whether to seek a questionnaire, writing strike criteria in advance—then runs the day itself: question design that produces information rather than agreement, preserving a cause challenge before anyone offers rehabilitation, the arithmetic of a limited number of peremptory strikes, and the contemporaneous notes that answer a Batson objection. It closes with the post-verdict issues that trace directly back to what was asked and what was preserved. It closes with the Batson sequence and the record-building that makes a challenge, or a defense of one, survive appeal.
Damage Statistics: Labor and Employment Litigation
This guide explains how money is actually awarded in labor and employment lawsuits, from the bread-and-butter of back pay and front pay to the headline-grabbing world of compensatory and punitive damages. It walks through the statutory architecture that controls each category, including the Title VII compensatory and punitive damage caps in 42 U.S.C. 1981a, the Supreme Court's Kolstad standard for punitive damages, and the doubling of liquidated damages under the ADEA and the FLSA. It covers emotional distress proof, attorney's-fee shifting, wage-and-hour collective recoveries, and the steep premium that retaliation claims carry. It also frames damage "statistics" honestly, explaining why publicly available numbers skew low and why the median tells you almost nothing about your own case. The aim is a clear, accurate map of what employment cases are worth and why.
Litigation Holds, Spoliation, and Rule 37(e): Preserving Electronic Evidence Before It Costs You the Case
Rule 37(e) rewrote the law of electronic evidence destruction in 2015, and a great deal of pre-2015 authority that lawyers still cite is no longer good law. The rule now forecloses the harshest sanctions unless the court finds that a party acted with the intent to deprive another party of the information, a standard far more demanding than the negligence or gross negligence tests several circuits had used. This article explains when the duty to preserve attaches and what it covers, how to issue and enforce a litigation hold that actually works, and how courts apply the two tiers of Rule 37(e): curative measures for prejudice under subsection (e)(1) and the severe sanctions of adverse inference, dismissal, and default under subsection (e)(2). It addresses the modern preservation problems that generate most disputes, including ephemeral and disappearing messages, collaboration platforms, personal devices, cloud accounts, text messages, and auto-deletion policies, and it explains the limits of a court's inherent authority after Goodyear v. Haeger. It closes with a hold template outline, a preservation checklist, a worked example, an FAQ, and related reading.
Birthright Citizenship Around the World
Birthright citizenship—the idea that being born on a country's soil makes you its citizen—is one of the most consequential and least understood rules in the law. This article explains the two organizing principles of nationality, jus soli ("right of the soil") and jus sanguinis ("right of blood"), and shows how nearly every country blends them. It surveys the global map: unrestricted birthright citizenship now clusters in the Americas, while the United Kingdom, Ireland, India, Australia, the Dominican Republic, and others have narrowed or abolished it since 1980. It then examines the United States in detail, where the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause, the 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, and the codifying statute at 8 U.S.C. § 1401 have long anchored a broad rule—and where a 2025 executive order seeking to limit that rule remains, as of mid-2026, blocked and unresolved before the Supreme Court. The piece adds worked hypotheticals, primary authority, and a frank account of the policy stakes, while being scrupulous about not overstating where the law currently stands.
AI Governance Toolkit: Inventory, Risk Classification, and Controls
AI governance fails in a predictable way: a policy is written, a committee is formed, and nobody ever learns what the company is actually running. This toolkit is built the other way around, starting with discovery and inventory and treating documentation as the output of a process rather than its substitute. It covers building an inventory that includes the tools procurement never saw, classifying systems by risk in a way that maps to the obligations that follow, running impact assessments that produce decisions rather than paper, designing human oversight that can actually override a model, testing for bias and accuracy on a schedule, giving notice where notice is required, and handling AI incidents that are not security incidents. It closes with the governance layer: policy, training, vendor management, board reporting, and the annual review that keeps the whole thing from decaying.
Damages Proof and Expert Model Checklist: A Practical Checklist
A working checklist for the damages side of a civil case, run in the order the case runs. It covers the damages intake, the preservation steps that keep accounting data readable, what must be pleaded and when, the discovery that builds a but-for world, a line-by-line review of an expert report before it is served, the exclusion analysis for attacking the other side's model, trial and verdict form items, and the post-judgment work on interest, costs, and collection. A defense column runs alongside throughout.