How you work with AI matters more than how much you know about AI. The mode to watch out for is the one where you review the AI’s output closely but look at the wrong things. Overview A July 2026 Harvard Business Review article, Shaping Early-Career Success in the Age of AI, by Agarwal, Barua, […]
SATIUS HOLDING, LLC v. SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO., LTD. (2025-1446, October 1, 2026) U.S. Patent No. 6,711,385 (“the 385 patent”) relates to a coupler designed to match the impedance of a transmitter to the impedance of air. The physics problem is a familiar one in RF engineering: signals reflect and lose power when transmitting between media […]
In One Weekend, a High-School Dropout Using AI Shook the Math World For about fifty years, mathematicians inched the proven share of the Riemann zeta function’s nontrivial zeros on the critical line from 33.3% to 41.6%. In a result announced in August 2026, an AI model raised it to 67.2% in about two days of […]
Patent offices are moving AI from experimentation into search and examination support workflows. For in-house IP teams, the practical response isn’t more automation for its own sake; it’s to strengthen prosecution readiness before filing so applicants can make the most of earlier, better-informed examination. For the last several years, most conversations about artificial intelligence and […]
The Nielsen Co. (US), LLC v. TVision Insights, Inc., No. 25-1371 (Fed. Cir. Aug. 14, 2026) U.S. Patent No. 11,470,243 (“the ‘243 patent”) covers audience measurement systems (essentially the technology that watches you while you watch television) ostensibly to count how many people are in the room and whether they are paying attention. The ‘243 […]
DENTAL MONITORING SAS v. ALIGN TECHNOLOGY, INC. Dental Monitoring SAS v. Align Technology, Inc. (Aug. 10, 2026) addressed an issue practitioners encounter with some regularity – priority-date requirements for prior art under the AIA. The question was whether a reference with a priority chain in which the earliest, but not latest, priority date predates the application at issue […]
What Separates an IP Attorney at SLW From a Patent Attorney Four SLW attorneys were named to the IAM Strategy 300: The World’s Leading IP Strategists 2026. What the distinction measures says something about how patent work is changing. Every company with an R&D budget eventually runs into a question that goes beyond any single […]
Can You Actually Keep It Secret? Trade Secrets When Reverse Engineering Gets Cheap In a recent piece I argued that agentic coding is draining your moat. When a capable team with the right tools can reach feature parity in days, the advantage of shipping first stops being defensible and becomes table stakes. That argument has […]
The Menu Changes, Not the Price A Few Thoughts on Patent Prosecution in 5, 10, and 15 Years, for In-House and Outside Counsel At a recent conference I attended, a panel was asked what patent prosecution might look like in five, ten, and fifteen years, for both in-house and outside counsel. I have some thoughts. […]
On October 23, 2026, four Chinese government bodies – the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the State Taxation Administration, and the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) – jointly issued a notice titled “Notice on Further Preventing the Influence of Unscrupulous Intermediary Agencies on the Cultivation and […]
On October 26, 2026, China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) released the Special Provisions on Protecting China’s Trade Secrets (Draft for Comment) (保护中国商业秘密特别规定（征求意见稿）). Despite its title, the Draft does not address general trade secret protection. It is a sanctions-style mechanism aimed at foreign companies, organizations, and individuals: where MOFCOM determines that a foreign entity’s infringement of […]
The Global Innovation Index (GII), published September 29, 2026 by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), ranks economies by innovation performance using indicators of innovation inputs and outputs. It also ranks the world’s top 100 innovation clusters and tracks global innovation trends. In the 2026 edition, which covers 139 economies, China ranks 10th. China held […]
Series note. This is the fourth post in the Preexamination series, following Part I,Part II, and Part III. From valid to worth owning The first three installments used AI to pressure-test claims against the prior art so that what gets filed is more likely to survive examination and challenge. Validity is necessary. It is not […]
Series note. This is the third post in the Preexamination series. Start with Preexamination: Seeing the Art Before the Office Does and Preexamination II: Landscape For Drafting Invention requires conception U.S. inventorship requires invention and invention requires conception. The USPTO’s revised inventorship guidance states the governing standard in the Federal Circuit’s terms and quotes them […]
Series note. This is the second post in the Preexamination series. The first was Preexamination: Seeing the Art Before the Office Does Part I argued that the introduction of AI is not simply better search. It is the ability to read a body of art, reason about what it teaches, and adapt the application while […]