The first week

Step 1 of 6. Find out the real date

In federal court, a response to a complaint is generally due 21 days after service. That is the ordinary rule and it is not the whole answer. Waivers move it. Extensions move it. The court's own local rules and the schedule in your particular case move it.

So the number to trust is not the one in an article. It is the one that belongs to your court and your case, confirmed by someone looking at your papers. Get the date on a calendar in writing, and get the date of service pinned down too, because everything else counts from there.

A demand letter is different. It carries no court deadline at all, which fools people into treating it as optional. It is not optional. It opens the same range of outcomes and it starts the same obligation to preserve documents.

On time and costConfirming a deadline is a short conversation, and no competent lawyer will charge you a fortune to have it. If nothing else in this week gets done, this does.

Step 2 of 6. Stop the automatic deletion today

Almost every company has a retention setting quietly removing email and files after 30, 60 or 90 days. It does not know a dispute has started. It keeps running while you decide what to do, and it deletes exactly the material a court will later expect you to have kept.

Suspend routine automatic deletion for anything that touches the accused product: email, chat, documents, design files, source repositories, ticket systems, the shared drive nobody has looked at since 2019. Tell whoever administers those systems in writing, today, and keep a copy of what you told them.

Courts treat the loss of that material seriously, and the consequences do not depend on whether anybody meant it. Of everything on this list, this is the one mistake that genuinely cannot be repaired later.

Step 3 of 6. Call the insurance broker

Some business policies cover intellectual property defense. Many companies carrying that coverage have no idea they have it, because nobody reads a policy until something happens.

The reason to call in the first week rather than the second month is that late notice can forfeit the coverage entirely. The obligation to tell your insurer often begins when the claim arrives, not when you decide to take it seriously.

On time and costThe call costs nothing and the answer is useful either way. Either a policy pays for part of a defense you were about to fund alone, or you learn now that it does not, which is worth knowing before you build a budget on a guess.

Step 4 of 6. Take the speculating out of writing

Under stress, capable people write things like “honestly, this probably does read on their claim,” or “we should have looked at this patent two years ago.” Both of those are discoverable. Neither is a legal conclusion, because the person writing it has not read the claims or the file history, but both will be read aloud later by someone who wants them to sound like one.

Questions about what a patent covers belong in a conversation with counsel, not in a thread among yourselves. Say so plainly to the handful of people who know about the matter, and keep the circle small.

The same goes for the other side. Nothing said to them in the first week improves your position, and some of it can be quoted back to you for years.

Step 5 of 6. Gather the pile

Before any lawyer can tell you anything useful, four things have to exist in one place.

• The patent numbers being asserted Every patent named in the letter or the complaint, by number. The full documents are free and public.
• Everything you received, with dates The letter, the complaint, the envelope, any proof of service, and any earlier correspondence from the same company, even the message somebody ignored a year ago.
• A plain description of how the product works Written by the people who built it, in ordinary language, without arguing about the patent. What it does and how, step by step.
• Who built it, and when Names, dates, design notes, version history, and anything from a supplier or an outside contractor.

Name one person inside the company to own this. Not a committee. Someone who can find a document, get the engineers into a room, and make a decision the same day.

Step 6 of 6. Interview more than one lawyer

Even when the first conversation goes well, have the second one. It teaches you what to listen for, and the differences that decide this are not the ones that show up in anybody's marketing.

Six questions are worth asking every person you talk to:

• 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?

Listen to the fifth and sixth answers especially. Anyone who cannot name a single thing they would refuse to spend your money on has not thought about your budget as a real constraint.

On time and costFee structure is a fair subject for a first conversation. Anyone who quotes you a confident total for a case nobody has investigated yet is guessing, and you will find out whose guess it was when the invoices arrive.