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.
Multistate Employment Compliance Checklist: A Practical Checklist
One employee working in a new state makes a company a multistate employer subject to that state's entire employment regime, its payroll tax registrations, and usually its business income and sales tax nexus. The obligations attach from the first day of work and most of them are invisible until a claim, an audit, or a notice arrives. This checklist runs the state-by-state review: the registrations that must be completed before the first paycheck, the wage and hour differences that catch employers paying only weekly overtime, the leave and notice mandates, the pay transparency and salary history rules that reach remote job postings, the restrictive covenant limits that can void an existing agreement when an employee relocates, and the handbook and posting architecture that keeps all of it maintainable. The organizing point is that the employee's physical work location governs, so the first task is always to establish where people actually are.
Bringing and Defending a Fair Housing Claim: A Practical Guide
This guide runs a fair housing matter from both sides. The complainant track covers recognizing what happened, the documentation to create in the first week, working with a fair housing organization and its testing program, choosing among the four enforcement paths and their different deadlines and remedies, filing with HUD without a lawyer, the investigation and conciliation process, when to elect federal court, and how to plead and prove a private action. The respondent track covers the first forty-eight hours after a complaint arrives, preserving records, drafting a position statement that does not create new problems, the defenses that actually work, when to conciliate, and how to build the compliance program that prevents the next one.
Reducing Video Privacy Protection Act Risk on a Website or App: A Practical Guide
This guide walks a publisher, retailer, fitness company, e-learning business, or nonprofit through reducing exposure under the Video Privacy Protection Act, in the order the work should actually happen. It covers a two-hour triage, a video inventory, a network-level pixel audit run by counsel and an engineer, audience and forum mapping, and the choice among removing tags, stripping data, gathering consent, or accepting risk. It gives sample consent language tied to the statute, vendor terms, retention rules, and arbitration trade-offs. It explains what to do on the day a demand letter arrives, including why deleting a pixel without preserving evidence is a mistake. A separate section gives the plaintiff's view: how a claim is evaluated, documented, and pleaded. Worked examples, a timeline, and a list of common mistakes make it usable on Monday morning.
Assessing and Reducing Secondary Copyright Liability: A Practical Guide
This guide walks a service operator or a rightsholder through a secondary copyright liability problem after Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment. Operators map their functions, test direct, inducement, tailoring, and vicarious exposure in turn, and decide what to keep of a DMCA program and why. It covers marketing and internal communications review, responding to demand letters and injunctions, and early defense motions. Rightsholders learn how to select defendants, gather the evidence that matters now, plead each theory, and use notices, subpoenas, and injunctions. Worked hypotheticals cover a host, a print-on-demand marketplace, an AI coding tool, and a photographer. It closes with common mistakes on both sides and a realistic account of cost and timing.
Trade Secrets in the Age of Remote Work and Cloud Computing
The shift to distributed workforces and cloud collaboration dissolved the corporate security perimeter and reshaped the "reasonable measures" requirement at the heart of trade secret law. This article analyzes how courts apply that requirement under the Defend Trade Secrets Act and the Uniform Trade Secrets Act when employees access proprietary information from personal devices, home networks, and cloud platforms the employer cannot control, drawing on a deep bench of authority from PepsiCo v. Redmond through a wave of 2022–2025 remote-work decisions. It translates the case law into a working protection program spanning access controls, multifactor authentication, data-loss prevention, contracts, onboarding, offboarding, departing-employee forensics, and incident response. It explains the DTSA's whistleblower-immunity notice and civil-seizure remedy, the inevitable disclosure doctrine, and the 2025 collapse of the FTC's non-compete rule. Written for in-house counsel, IP and employment practitioners, and the executives responsible for protecting confidential information in hybrid environments.
Non-Compete Agreements Under Siege: FTC Rulemaking and State Law Developments
The Federal Trade Commission's attempt to ban non-compete agreements nationwide is dead—set aside in Ryan, LLC v. FTC in August 2024 and formally abandoned by the Commission in September 2025—but the regulatory and judicial assault on restrictive covenants has only intensified. This article tells the full story of the FTC rule's rise and fall, including the Section 5/Section 6(g) authority debate and the major-questions problem that doomed it, then maps the fifty-state patchwork of bans, income thresholds, notice requirements, and physician-specific prohibitions that now governs employer practice. It explains the common-law reasonableness test, the blue-pencil problem, and the consideration traps that void agreements employers think are airtight, and it details the post-ban toolkit: garden leave, forfeiture-for-competition clauses, enhanced non-solicitation and confidentiality agreements, and the Defend Trade Secrets Act. Following a fictional sensor manufacturer through a complete redesign of its protection program, the piece shows how sophisticated employers protect trade secrets and customer goodwill without relying on a single fragile restraint. The throughline: the non-compete is under siege, but the interests it protected are not, and the tools for defending them have never been more sophisticated.
Drafting and Opposing Motions in Limine: A Practical Guide
This guide takes a trial team through motions in limine from the first reading of the judge's trial procedures to the last objection at trial, and gives the opposing party a parallel path at each step. It starts with the decisions to make before drafting: which issues need a pretrial ruling, which are better left to trial, and how a cap on the number of motions changes the calculus. The numbered steps cover building the calendar, inventorying the evidence, ranking and selecting motions, conferring and stipulating, framing each request, building the evidentiary record, drafting the brief and proposed order, handling expert motions under the amended Rule 702, opposing a motion, arguing it at the pretrial conference, and implementing the rulings at trial. Each step explains what to do, why, the governing authority, the common pitfalls, timing, and cost. A timeline and cost table, an extended worked example from a trucking collision case, common mistakes, an FAQ, and takeaways close the guide.
Website Accessibility Remediation Checklist: A Practical Checklist
Website accessibility litigation is high-volume, low-value, and highly repeatable, which means the cheapest defense is a documented remediation program rather than a settlement. This checklist works through legal exposure first, because the answer differs by circuit and by whether the business has a physical location, then moves to the technical work: an audit combining automated scanning with manual keyboard and screen reader testing, prioritized remediation of the defects that actually block users, and the governance that keeps a remediated site from regressing. Separate phases address mobile apps, PDFs and third-party content, overlay widgets and why they are not a defense, procurement language for new vendors, and what to do in the first week after a demand letter arrives. The through-line is documentation: an audit, a prioritized plan, and dated records are worth more in defending a claim than any single technical fix.
Planning and Running a Litigation Settlement Negotiation: A Practical Guide
This guide takes a litigator from the decision to explore settlement through a signed term sheet, in thirteen steps that work for plaintiffs and defendants alike. It shows how to value a case as a range of outcomes net of fees, time, interest, taxes, liens, and collection risk, and how to turn that valuation into a reservation price and a target. It covers confirming client authority and interests, improving the alternative to settlement before talks begin, choosing between direct talks, private mediation, and a judicial settlement conference, and building an opening strategy and a written concession plan. It then walks through mediation preparation, including the mediation statement and the decision whether to hold a joint opening session, and running the day itself, from first caucus to brackets and mediator's proposals. The final steps cover closing the gap, writing a binding term sheet at the table that anticipates enforcement under Kokkonen, and documenting the result, followed by a timeline and cost table, a worked example in a software dispute, common mistakes, an FAQ, and takeaways.
Handling an Insurance Claim After a Property Loss
A first-party property claim is a contractual process with deadlines, documentation requirements, and a built-in tension between an insured who wants to be made whole and an insurer whose adjuster is measuring the loss. Most underpayments are not the result of bad faith; they are the result of an insured who did not document the loss, did not understand the valuation provisions, and accepted the first number. This guide covers the sequence: the first forty-eight hours and the duty to mitigate, giving notice under every potentially applicable policy, documenting the damage in a form the policy's proof of loss will accept, how adjusters work and when to retain your own, the valuation provisions that determine the payment, the business interruption claim that is usually larger than the property claim and always harder to prove, the appraisal process, and what to do when the claim is denied or underpaid. It closes with subrogation, mortgagee interests, and the claim file an insured should build from the first hour, because nearly every underpayment traces to documentation that was never created.
Preparing Your Startup for Capital Raising—A Comprehensive Guide
This is the pre-raise readiness playbook for founders who want to walk into a fundraise already "diligence-ready"—the legal, structural, and record-keeping state in which an investor's lawyer can open your data room, run the standard checklist, and find clean, complete, internally consistent answers. It explains why venture-track companies choose a Delaware C-corporation, how to keep a cap table that reconciles to signed documents, and how founder vesting and the Section 83(b) election work, including the absolute 30-day filing deadline under Treasury Regulation Section 1.83-2(b). It covers IP chain of title from founders and contractors, employee equity (ISOs under IRC Section 422, NSOs, and the Section 409A valuation safe harbors of Treasury Regulation Section 1.409A-1(b)(5)), corporate housekeeping, good standing, financial statements, and the construction of a real virtual data room mirroring how diligence counsel actually work. It maps the securities-law exposure prior raises can leave behind under Regulation D, closes with the landmines that kill or reprice deals, a worked example, and a detailed FAQ, and cross-links to the related capital-raising and document articles in this series. It is written so a founder, a lawyer, and a judge can all follow it, and every term of art is defined in plain language the first time it appears.
Drafting an Answer and Affirmative Defenses: A Practical Guide
This guide walks a defendant's lawyer, or a defendant without one, through drafting a federal answer in the order the work actually happens, from the day the complaint arrives to the two weeks after filing when the jury-demand and third-party windows close. It explains how to compute and extend the Rule 12(a) deadline without giving anything away, how to decide between a Rule 12 motion and an answer, and how to investigate before admitting or denying anything. It then shows how to build a paragraph-by-paragraph response chart using the three responses Rule 8(b) allows, how to screen affirmative defenses with three questions about burden, facts, and cost, and which statutory defenses intellectual property defendants must plead. It covers compulsory and permissive counterclaims, crossclaims, and third-party complaints, the components and companion filings of the pleading, a pre-filing review, and the deadlines the answer itself triggers. It closes with strategy for each side, costs, common mistakes, a worked example in which a software company answers a photo-licensing copyright complaint, an FAQ, and practical takeaways.