September 10, 2026 - Articles
Consumer packaged goods companies know how to spend on a brand. They know how to lock a formula in a vault. They are much slower to treat a patent as an operating asset.
That habit was always expensive. It is more expensive now.
September 1, 2026 - Articles
Quantum computing poses an unusual problem for general counsel: the deadline is uncertain, but waiting for certainty may itself create material risk.
No publicly known quantum computer can presently defeat the public-key cryptography on which modern commerce depends. The timing of a “cryptographically relevant” quantum computer remains contested. Yet adversaries do not need to wait. They can collect encrypted information today and attempt to decrypt it later—a strategy commonly called “harvest now, decrypt later.” At the same time, large organizations may need years to locate cryptography embedded across applications, cloud services, connected products, operational technology, certificates, digital signatures, and third-party platforms.
2026-08-18 - Articles
By late 2024, Google was reporting that more than a quarter of its new code was being written by AI. Microsoft followed with similar numbers in 2025. In startups built from scratch on coding agents, the human share of the codebase can be a rounding error. The productivity story is familiar. The ownership story is not.
July 31, 2026 - Articles
Not long ago, a technologist ran an experiment that should keep every software executive awake at night: using an off-the-shelf AI coding agent, he built a working Salesforce-style CRM — data model, interface and all — in roughly three hours. Not a mockup. A functioning product that took the original companies years and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop.
July 23, 2026 - Articles
In November 2025, a California jury awarded Masimo $634 million after finding that Apple Watch heart-rate notification features infringed claims of
Masimo’s U.S. Patent No. 10,433,776. In July 2026, the district court
entered final judgment preserving that award after denying Apple’s post-trial effort to obtain judgment as a matter of law or a new trial. The judgment remains subject to appellate review.
July 14, 2026 - Articles
An AI system does not have one legal identity.
A model that summarizes internal meetings may present familiar privacy, security and contract questions. Connect the same model to a hiring score, credit decision, insurance recommendation or patient interaction, and the analysis changes. Put it in a public chatbot used by minors, and a different set of concerns appears. Use it to generate images or audio, and disclosure and provenance rules may matter.
This is the most useful way to read the emerging state AI patchwork: the legal unit of analysis is not the model. It is the moment when the system interacts with a person, influences a decision or produces an output that the law treats differently.
July 8, 2026 - Articles
In the first quarter of 2026, petitions to invalidate issued U.S. patents at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board fell to 131 — a 64 percent drop from the year before and the lowest quarterly total in the tribunal's history. If you are not a patent lawyer, that statistic probably reads as trivia. It shouldn't. It is one of several signals from the past twelve months that the value of an American patent has shifted — sharply upward — and that shift is already changing how investors underwrite product innovation.
July 1, 2026 - Articles
Acquirers are increasingly looking at businesses whose products use AI, depend on AI, or sit close enough to AI that the buyer expects future value from data, automation, software or model-enabled workflows. The target may not be an “AI company” in the headline sense. It may be a medical-device company using machine-learning outputs in a diagnostic workflow, a software platform embedding generative AI in a user interface, a manufacturer using computer vision in quality control, a services business with proprietary datasets and automation, or a consumer brand relying on AI-created marketing assets.
June 9, 2026 - Articles
Patent enforcement has always required two decisions, not one.
The first is the obvious question: can the patent owner prove infringement and survive the expected validity challenges?
The second is the question that often drives the boardroom discussion: if the case goes badly, how much additional exposure does the plaintiff face?
That second question has become harder to answer. Section 285 of the Patent Act allows a court to award reasonable attorney fees to the prevailing party in “exceptional cases.” Section 1927 can expose counsel personally when an attorney unreasonably and vexatiously multiplies proceedings. Those are serious tools. They are also easy to overstate when a defendant has just won and wants the court to treat the plaintiff’s loss as proof that the case never should have been filed.
June 3, 2026 - Articles
Consumer packaged goods companies are good at measuring velocity, margin, distribution, shelf position, and repeat purchase. They are often less disciplined about measuring the intellectual property created while those numbers improve.
That gap matters. In CPG, the most valuable innovation is not always the headline product. It may be the closure that reduces leakage, the formulation tweak that stabilizes shelf life, the refill system that changes unit economics, the manufacturing step that saves twenty seconds per batch, the package geometry that makes a club-store pallet work, or the visual identity that turns a commodity into a premium item.
