Confirm the real date, before anything else
In federal court a response to a complaint is generally due twenty-one days after service. That date moves with waivers and extensions, and it belongs to your particular court and your particular case, so the number in that sentence is a starting point and not your deadline.
Confirming it takes one call and removes the loudest source of panic in the room.
A demand letter that arrives before any lawsuit has no such deadline attached, and it still starts real obligations, including the one directly below.
Turn off automatic deletion today
Most companies quietly delete email and files on a schedule. As soon as a dispute appears, that routine deletion should be suspended for anything touching the accused product: email, chat, design files, source control, test results, supplier correspondence.
Courts treat this seriously, and the deletion does not have to be deliberate to become its own problem. This is the one item on the list that gets worse every day it waits.
Call the insurance broker
Some business policies cover intellectual property defense. Many companies never find out, because nobody asks until the bills have already been paid, and late notice can forfeit the coverage entirely.
Asking costs nothing and the answer arrives quickly.
Keep speculation out of email
Internal messages guessing about whether the product infringes, or about what an engineer may have seen years ago, can be read later by people who were not in the room and have no reason to read them generously.
Facts are fine. Guesses written down have a way of becoming exhibits.
Gather these before the first conversation
- The patent numbers being asserted, exactly as written.
- Everything received so far, with the date each item arrived and how it arrived.
- A plain description of how the product actually works, written by someone who built it rather than someone who sells it.
- Who built it, and whether any of it came from outside the company.
A lawyer can find the rest. The last two are the two nobody outside the company can assemble for you.
Two things that surprise almost everyone
Copying is not required
A patent is a time-limited right to stop other people from making, using or selling what it describes. At the end of every patent is a set of numbered sentences called claims, and those claims are the property line. If a product does what one of them describes, it can infringe even if the company invented it independently and had never heard of the patent or its owner.
A judge decides what the words mean, before a jury hears anything
In a proceeding usually called claim construction, or a Markman hearing, the court rules on what the disputed words in the claims mean. Cases are frequently decided, in substance, by that ruling rather than by a trial.
Which is why the record of what the patent owner said to the patent office years ago, to get those words allowed, turns out to matter so much.
Interview more than one lawyer
Talk to at least two, and ask all of them the same things. The answers differ more than the credentials do.
- Can you understand our technology at the level it was built, or will you depend on an expert to translate it for you?
- Will you read the patent's full prosecution history yourself?
- Can you explain what this means for the business in language our board can use?
- How will you explain this technology to a judge or a jury who has never seen it?
- What would you decline to spend our money on?
- How do you create pressure without letting the cost run away?
He kept us fully informed at every stage, explained complex issues in understandable terms, and always prioritized our best interests with the utmost ethical standards.
That is the standard to hold every lawyer you interview to, including this one.
Before you rely on any of it
Everything above is general information about how patent disputes ordinarily work. It is not legal advice, and it is not advice about your situation, which nobody can give without knowing it.
Reading this does not create an attorney-client relationship. Deadlines, preservation obligations and insurance terms depend entirely on your court, your case and your policies, and only a lawyer who has looked at your documents can tell you what yours are.
Please do not send confidential information through this site or by email before a relationship is in place. Legal services are provided through Practus, LLP.