Intellectual Property

If managed with purpose, a patent portfolio can be one of a company’s most valuable strategic assets. Too often, portfolios grow without a clear connection to business objectives, consuming time and money without delivering meaningful value. A thoughtful patent audit helps companies refocus their efforts, reduce waste, and ensure their intellectual property supports long-term growth. Here are practical tips to guide an effective audit.

Lex Machina released earlier this year its 2026 Trade Secret Litigation Report, a retrospective trends report chronicling the rise in federal trade secret litigation, highlighting a subspecialty of civil litigation that is more active, more federalized, and less prone to early resolution than other case types. But beneath those headline findings, additional data points reveal a quieter transformation in how these cases are litigated, valued, and decided.

In November, the USPTO refused Taylor Swift’s application to register The Life of a Showgirl. The mark was confusingly similar, the office wrote, to one already federally registered: “Confessions of a Showgirl,” owned since 2015 by a Las Vegas performer named Maren Wade. Wade had built her brand under that name for 12 years. A column in Las Vegas Weekly, a podcast, a touring cabaret. Swift’s merchandise operation continued anyway.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit recently held that a cease-and-desist letter can establish personal jurisdiction, finding that cease-and-desist letters sent to Floridian licensees that went beyond merely informing others of the sender’s intellectual property rights are sufficient to establish the minimum contacts necessary to exercise personal jurisdiction over nonresident defendants.

A proposed class action filed against Meta Platforms in New York federal court targets not only the company and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg but also two former senior AI researchers by name — an unusual move that could signal a new front in the wave of copyright litigation against artificial intelligence companies.

Patents are not static assets. They are legal instruments shaped over time by prosecution, continuation practice, post‑grant proceedings, and cross‑border filings. Treating them as fixed objects in a fixed landscape misstates the risk.

At a recent trade secret conference, several speakers highlighted a problem with a common industry practice related to non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). In particular, NDAs are often drafted such that they (and the confidentiality obligations therein) expire after a set term, but there is a very real risk that doing so may inadvertently destroy trade secret status of information disclosed pursuant to the NDA.

Improper or non-conforming data rights markings can lead to objection or challenge by the U.S. government, and a failure to mark may lead to loss of certain rights in the underlying IP. Accordingly, this article provides a practical guide to data rights marking, especially for those individuals involved in, or responsible for, marking content delivered to the USG.