The Business of Patents
The Trademark Office has required foreign-domiciled applicants to be represented by a U.S.-licensed attorney since 2019. As of this summer, the patent side has caught up. The USPTO published a final rule on March 20, 2026, requiring foreign-domiciled applicants and patent owners to be represented by a practitioner registered and in good standing with the […]
Read more →Software is the redheaded stepchild of intellectual property. It is not well protected by any of patent, copyright, trademark, or trade secret law, and the reason is not hard to find – none of those regimes was built with software in mind, and they seem to protect all but what is most important to a […]
Read more →Obviousness rejections are among the most, if not the most, frustrating rejections a patent applicant can face. The examiner typically assembles two or three old patents or published patent applications as prior art references, announces that a person of ordinary skill in the art (a “POSITA”) would have combined them, and then supplies a reason […]
Read more →For more than a decade, the most prevalent way to attack a patent outside of court has been the “inter partes review” (IPR) provided by the America Invents Act in 2012. That is changing quickly. As the USPTO has issued an increasing number of discretionary denials – refusing to institute an IPR without ever reaching […]
Read more →Few questions in patent law have caused clients more frustration than the most basic one of all – whether an invention is even eligible for a patent in the first place. Since the Supreme Court’s decisions in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, 573 U.S. 208 (2014), and Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc., […]
Read more →What do you do when a rival sends you a cease and desist letter accusing you of patent infringement? If you said, “nothing,” that was the wrong answer. If you are eventually sued for infringement and you made no effort to investigate their claim and, if necessary, remedy your infringement, you could be found to […]
Read more →In recent months, we have been working extensively with customized AI tools to assist with both administrative and substantive aspects of our practice. Tools like these can deliver real efficiency gains, and in some cases, they let us operate at a level of depth that was not previously practical. They are, in our view, here […]
Read more →In our experience, startups and founders often treat design patents as a lesser form of protection – cheaper than a utility patent, perhaps useful for marketing, but not really a serious patent. That view ignores some real strategic benefits they can provide. In the right circumstances, design patents are faster, cheaper, harder to invalidate, and […]
Read more →A recent Federal Circuit decision has settled the question of whether a patent can be invalidated under the America Invents Act for improper inventorship. The answer, the Court has now confirmed, is yes. In Fortress Iron, LP v. Digger Specialties, Inc., the Federal Circuit addressed whether a patent could be found invalid under 35 USC […]
Read more →The USPTO’s most recent guidelines (November 2025) concerning AI-assisted inventions may place the validity of patents at risk if the development of the claimed inventions relied heavily on AI tools. The guidelines also pose some perplexing questions about how much AI involvement is “too much” when inventing. Artificial intelligence tools are now part of the […]
Read more →It is often necessary or desirable for two companies to partner up to develop technologies. One context that frequently arises is when a component supplier is developing a product for an original equipment manufacturer (OEM). In these cases, the design of the component is driven by the OEM’s needs and specifications, but the component supplier […]
Read more →The International Energy Association (IEA) released its 2026 Report on the State of Energy Innovation in February. A copy can be obtained here: https://www.iea.org/reports/the-state-of-energy-innovation-2026. It contains extensive data on the global patenting of energy technologies and has some surprising findings for companies in this space. The first finding that was of note to us was that […]
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