As in-house patent teams rethink how work is allocated, the implications for outside counsel are unavoidable. Corporate clients are asking whether work being done by outside counsel is being performed as efficiently as possible and even starting to ask whether it needs to be performed by outside counsel at all. At least some in-house teams are wondering whether the same or better result can be achieved internally using AI-enabled tools. If the answer is yes, then clients can be expected to decrease reliance on outside counsel, looking to law firm attorneys for targeted support, not end-to-end project management.
To say we live in perplexing times is an understatement. Everything seems to be shifting beneath our feet, often with seemingly little thought. One example is the move to change how the federal government supports research.
Artificial intelligence has moved beyond the experimental phase in legal practice. The legal industry is no longer debating whether lawyers can or should use AI tools, or whether AI will affect the economics of law firm and in-house legal department operations. Those questions have been answered. AI is already reshaping how legal work is performed, how legal departments manage demand, how law firms are expected to price services, how patent teams analyze portfolios, and how clients evaluate outside counsel.
When the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a new, easier-to-administer version of a popular cancer medicine called Keytruda a few months ago, patients celebrated. But critics quickly cried foul, accusing the drug’s manufacturer of gaming the patent system to preserve its monopoly and prevent cheaper competitors from coming to market.
I keep hearing the same thing from patent professionals across the industry—inside companies, inside law firms, and even from investors. Patent budgets are shrinking, expectations are rising, and nobody seems willing to admit what that combination actually means.
Arnold & Porter is a leading international law firm with offices across the United States, Europe, and Asia. The firm delivers sophisticated regulatory, litigation, and transactional services to clients across a wide range of industries. Arnold & Porter is seeking a Senior Manager of IP Prosecution to join its Washington, DC office. This role provides firmwide leadership for the Intellectual Property Prosecution function, overseeing patent and trademark operations and ensuring the delivery of efficient, high-quality support to attorneys and clients.
This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I had the pleasure of speaking with Deborah Farone, founder of Farone Advisors, former Chief Marketing Officer of Cravath, Swain & Moore, and author of Breaking Ground: How Successful Women Lawyers Build Thriving Practices. Our conversation focused on how lawyers—particularly in highly technical fields like intellectual property—can build thriving practices through disciplined, strategic business development. The discussion underscores that business development is a skill, not an innate personality trait. Even introverted attorneys can succeed by taking incremental steps, practicing authentic communication, and focusing on listening rather than selling.
Gerasimow Law is seeking an Associate Attorney to provide core support to a Partner and Senior Associate across a diverse intellectual property docket. This role offers direct involvement in the technical and legal life cycle of a case, from initial filing through post-grant challenges. This position is fully remote with no in-office requirement. Candidates located in Illinois or Texas are a plus.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision today affirming a district court ruling that Mylan Pharmaceuticals’ generic hypertension drug did not literally infringe Actelion Pharmaceuticals’ U.S. patents for its own hypertension drug, Veletri®. The CAFC also affirmed the district court’s holding that Actelion had not proven and was barred from asserting infringement by an equivalent.
Yesterday, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a trademark alert highlighting actions that the agency has taken recently to remove fraudulent and otherwise invalid marks from the federal trademark register. In 11 administrative orders issued by the USPTO since the beginning of last October, the agency has either invalidated or is targeting for invalidation around 10,500 trademark applications and registrations for reasons including forged attorney signatures and inventing non-existent trademark registration requirements and fees.
This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we discuss whether patent owners are better off facing post-grant challenges at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) or the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). PTAB practitioners Matt Phillips and Kevin Greenleaf joined me for about how patent owners and challengers should be strategically thinking about the shifting post-grant environment at the USPTO. Our conversation highlights the growing reality that post-grant practice is no longer defined solely by inter partes review (IPR), but that ex parte reexamination has seen a resurgence in popularity, which requires careful evaluating timing, procedural dynamics, cost, and institutional realities. Fundamentally we attempt to answer the question of whether patent owners are better off in reexamination, or whether they are better off with IPR at the PTAB.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied certiorari in Zioness Movement, Inc. v. The Lawfare Project, Inc., a case in which Zioness Movement sought review of a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decision that upheld a jury verdict allowing two competing nonprofit entities to co-own the “Zioness” trademark.
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order list including the denial of a petition for writ of certiorari filed by Dr. Stephen Thaler that challenged federal agency and court rulings preventing copyright registration for an image generated entirely by artificial intelligence (AI). In following the U.S. Solicitor General’s call to deny cert to Thaler’s appeal, the Supreme Court declined invitations from both sides of the AI authorship debate to clarify the copyrightability of works that are substantially AI-generated.
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