Trade Secrets
Is reverse engineering a defense to trade secret misappropriation?
Both the Uniform Trade Secrets Act and the Defend Trade Secrets Act treat reverse engineering and independent derivation as proper means. What decides a case is how the article was obtained and what the development record shows.
Trade Secrets
What is the inevitable disclosure doctrine, and which states reject it?
A doctrine that can bar someone from a job without any proof they took anything — and one that California rejected outright, Maryland refused to adopt, and a New York federal court confined to the rarest of cases.
Patent Infringement
How is willful infringement proved, and what does it change?
Deliberate or intentional infringement, found by a jury. Whether that finding buys anything is a separate question the judge answers afterward, and the answer is often no.
Royalty Evidence
What are the Georgia-Pacific factors, and what do courts criticize about them?
Fifteen evidentiary factors drawn from a 1970 district court opinion, and a body of Federal Circuit criticism aimed not at the list but at experts who recite it. The complaint is always the same: no tie between the factor and the record.
Patent Infringement
What is the doctrine of equivalents, and when does prosecution history bar it?
A narrow route applied limitation by limitation, and the file wrapper closes it more often than it opens it — including, after Colibri Heart Valve in 2025, on the strength of a claim that was canceled rather than amended.
Royalty Evidence
Can a settlement license set the royalty rate?
Sometimes, under limited circumstances, and both of the cases everyone cites for the proposition are routinely described backward. One permitted reliance on a settlement license; the other ordered a settlement license excluded.
Royalty Evidence
Can whole-product revenue be the royalty base?
Rarely. It requires showing the patented feature drives demand for the entire product — not that it is important or a selling point, but that it is why customers buy.
Royalty Evidence
What makes a patent license comparable?
Technical and economic similarity, established rather than asserted. The failure is rarely choosing bad licenses — it is drawing from an agreement a proposition it does not support.
Royalty Evidence
Why are patent damages experts being excluded so often?
Because the failures are evidentiary rather than mathematical — and the remedy can be a nominal award after infringement has already been proved.
Trade Secrets
An employee left and we think they took files. What do we do first?
Preserve, before you investigate and well before you decide whether to act. The devices go back into the reimaging pool on roughly a two-week cycle.
Trade Secrets
What counts as reasonable measures to protect a trade secret?
Not perfect security — evidence that you actually treated the information as secret. What defeats claims is ordinary organizational drift, not sophisticated attackers.
Trade Secrets
How specifically do you have to identify a trade secret?
Specifically enough that an opposing expert could take the description and compare it, item by item, to the defendant’s product. "Our manufacturing process" fails that test.
Patent Infringement
Where does the prior art that ends cases actually come from?
Disproportionately not from the patent databases. Examiners search patents thoroughly and everything else lightly, which is where the gap lives.
Patent Infringement
What makes a claim chart actually prove infringement?
Evidence in the right-hand column. The most common weakness in an infringement report is a chart that paraphrases the claim with the accused product’s name inserted.
Patent Infringement
Why does claim construction decide the case?
Because both sides are arguing about the accused product while appearing to argue about the invention — and the construction that wins on infringement is frequently the one that loses on validity.