IP analysis for litigators. general counsel. patent owners. accused infringers. investors. licensing teams. trade secret claimants. boards.

Decisions taken long before anyone contemplated litigation. For patents, whether products were marked and when actual notice was given can determine when damages begin to accrue at all, and a statutory look-back bounds the rest. For trade secrets, information that was never identified with particularity internally is hard to specify convincingly later. And across both, a company’s own past licenses are discoverable and become the ceiling on what it can credibly claim. None of this can be repaired once a complaint is filed, which is why it is worth an afternoon now rather than a motion later.

Preserve, before you investigate and well before you decide whether to act. Pull their laptop and phone out of the reimaging queue and have them forensically imaged; suspend automatic deletion on their mailbox and accounts rather than closing them; and capture badge, VPN, file access and email logs for the preceding several months. Examining the device yourself first is the common own goal — it changes timestamps and hands the other side an argument about the integrity of the evidence. Everything else can wait a fortnight. This cannot.

It explains what the technical and evidentiary questions in an IP dispute are and what evidence they need: what the claims cover and whether the accused thing practices them, whether information qualifies as a trade secret and whether the record shows it was taken, and whether a damages theory rests on evidence that will survive challenge. It is a reference and a diagnostic. It does not litigate, does not prosecute patents, and does not opine on whether any particular patent is infringed or valid — that is the expert opinion this site helps you obtain rather than the one it supplies.

Because the gatekeeping role has been taken more seriously since the expert-testimony rule was amended at the end of 2023, and appellate courts have applied that scrutiny hard to damages inputs. The failures are evidentiary rather than mathematical: licenses characterized as establishing a rate they do not unambiguously establish, a portfolio license used without separating the asserted patent from the others in it, a royalty base with no shown causal connection to the accused functionality. In one 2025 decision a jury award of roughly ten million dollars became one dollar on that basis, with infringement never in doubt.

The orientation and the reference material are free and require no account. Where a party wants the technical or evidentiary review performed properly and independently — ideally before a theory is committed to — that is a private engagement billed as a fixed fee agreed in writing beforehand. Where a matter needs a retained testifying expert, the Institute helps identify the right one through its expert network. It does not litigate, does not sell licensing or monetization services, and takes no share of any recovery.

No, and the distinction matters more here than it sounds. This Institute covers the foundation: whether the evidence supports a damages theory and whether the opinion will be admitted. What the theory should then compute — which measure applies, and what it yields — belongs to our Economic Damages Institute, which covers the royalty, apportionment and trade secret measures properly. A matter needing both is usually two engagements and sometimes two experts, and it is far cheaper to know that at the outset than at expert disclosure.