Six principles

Principle 1 of 6. Understanding before strategy

A strategy chosen before the record is understood is a guess wearing a suit. The prosecution history of the patent gets read completely, all of it, before any position is taken about what the case is.

That reading is slow, and it is the part of a patent dispute most often delegated down or skipped in favor of a summary. It is also the part that decides what the disputed words can honestly be made to mean, which decides most of the rest.

The evidence for it is not a slogan. It is two engineering degrees, electrical and computer, earned before law school, and a legal career that began by writing patent applications rather than by attacking them. Reading a file wrapper is not a chore when it is the work you were originally trained to do.

Principle 2 of 6. Complexity has to become understandable

Patent cases are decided by people who did not build the technology. A district judge, a panel of appellate judges, twelve jurors, and often a board of directors who must approve what it costs to keep going.

Nobody in that group is going to learn the engineering. They are going to decide anyway. So the ability to take a system apart and hand it over in language a smart non-specialist can hold is not a communication skill sitting next to the legal work. It is the legal work.

The same is true inside your own company. A patent matter that only the lawyers understand is a matter your executives cannot make decisions about, which means the decisions get made by default.

Principle 3 of 6. Details create leverage. Volume does not

Leverage in a patent case rarely comes from doing more of everything. It comes from small, specific, verifiable things.

A limitation the applicant added to get past a rejection, which now narrows the claim in a way the patent owner would rather not discuss. An inconsistency between what an expert says today and what the inventor wrote at the time. A dependent claim that gives away what the independent claim was understood to exclude.

Finding those requires the reading in the first principle. Using them requires restraint, because pressure applied everywhere is not pressure. It is just cost, borne by the client, on a schedule the other side is happy to keep.

On time and costA dispute can be lost by spending too much as surely as by losing a motion. Asking what a lawyer would decline to spend your money on is a fair question and the answer is informative. Anyone who cannot name a single thing has not thought about it.

Principle 4 of 6. Composure at the hearing is built months earlier

What looks like calm in a courtroom is almost always preparation that happened a long time before, when nobody was watching. The lawyer who is not rattled by the question from the bench is usually the one who already answered it out loud, badly, in a conference room in March.

That is what a mock hearing is for. Someone plays the judge, asks the hardest version of every question, and the argument gets rebuilt around the places it fell over. It is unpleasant, it takes hours that do not appear in any filing, and it is the difference between an argument that survives contact and one that does not.

The same preparation is what lets a witness from your company sit down and simply tell the truth clearly, which is all anyone actually needs them to do.

Principle 5 of 6. Teaching is a litigation skill

A jury is a classroom that did not volunteer. Twelve people are told to sit down and learn a technology they did not choose, from two competing instructors, one of whom is trying to confuse them.

Teaching is a trainable craft, and it was trained here before the law was: undergraduate business law, graduate mathematics, and an engineering lab, all at the University of Missouri. Afterward came Patent Academy, a training program for patent lawyers built at Shook, Hardy & Bacon, and years of continuing legal education for other attorneys.

What that produces is a habit of noticing where an explanation actually breaks, rather than assuming the listener will catch up.

Principle 6 of 6. Technology sharpens judgment. It does not replace it

The comfort with technology here is old and practical. A computer services company called ProSolv, founded to help pay for college. Engineering work on control systems, microelectronics and telecommunications. An analyst's job at Accenture. Executive education at Wharton on the economics of blockchain and digital assets, and a plain-language newsletter on that subject called Clarifying the Cryptic.

Artificial intelligence now sits in the daily work the same way a research database did twenty years ago. It reads faster than a person and it is confidently wrong often enough that everything it produces has to be checked by someone who already knows the answer.

Which is the whole point. A tool that saves an hour is worth having. A tool asked to supply the judgment is a liability, and in this field it is one a client pays for later.

These are real recommendations, published by the people who wrote them. Read all seven at their source on LinkedIn, or read all seven in full here.