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Lana Akopyan
Intellectual Property Attorney
Lana.Law
Lana Akopyan is an intellectual property attorney with Lana.Law and has more than 16 years of patent and IP strategy experience, including in-house counsel work for technology businesses. She has a background in computer science and software engineering, and her practice spans patents, trademarks, trade secrets, copyrights, software IP strategy, and AI governance. She is the author of Operational IP Debt (forthcoming, Journal of Technology Law and Policy, University of Florida; available on SSRN), a framework for how AI-driven organizations lose IP value before the law applies.
Recent Articles by Lana Akopyan
Not Every AI Output Belongs in an IDS
An AI interaction can give rise to a Rule 56 disclosure obligation. Not because AI was involved, but because of the information the interaction put before you. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has already drawn that line. Its April 2024 guidance says there is no general obligation to disclose that an AI tool was used; the duty is implicated when the use rises to the level of materiality under Rule 56(b). The trigger is materiality, not AI.
AI Does Not Destroy Patent Rights: Bad Channels and Bad Judgment Do
An inventor pastes an unfiled disclosure into a chatbot to clean up the wording. An associate runs a draft specification through an AI tool to pressure-test claim support. A client forwards the analysis an AI gave them about their own case. All routine now, and each has produced a warning that AI quietly destroys patent rights: the prompt becomes prior art, novelty is lost, inventorship is corrupted, the application turns suspect. Some of those warnings are real. Most misidentify what went wrong.