ARTICLES
July 31, 2026
Not long ago, a technologist ran an experiment that should keep every software executive awake at night: using an off-the-shelf AI coding agent, he built a working Salesforce-style CRM — data model, interface and all — in roughly three hours. Not a mockup. A functioning product that took the original companies years and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop.
July 23, 2026
In November 2025, a California jury awarded Masimo $634 million after finding that Apple Watch heart-rate notification features infringed claims of
Masimo’s U.S. Patent No. 10,433,776. In July 2026, the district court
entered final judgment preserving that award after denying Apple’s post-trial effort to obtain judgment as a matter of law or a new trial. The judgment remains subject to appellate review.
July 14, 2026
An AI system does not have one legal identity.
A model that summarizes internal meetings may present familiar privacy, security and contract questions. Connect the same model to a hiring score, credit decision, insurance recommendation or patient interaction, and the analysis changes. Put it in a public chatbot used by minors, and a different set of concerns appears. Use it to generate images or audio, and disclosure and provenance rules may matter.
This is the most useful way to read the emerging state AI patchwork: the legal unit of analysis is not the model. It is the moment when the system interacts with a person, influences a decision or produces an output that the law treats differently.
July 8, 2026
In the first quarter of 2026, petitions to invalidate issued U.S. patents at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board fell to 131 — a 64 percent drop from the year before and the lowest quarterly total in the tribunal's history. If you are not a patent lawyer, that statistic probably reads as trivia. It shouldn't. It is one of several signals from the past twelve months that the value of an American patent has shifted — sharply upward — and that shift is already changing how investors underwrite product innovation.
July 1, 2026
Acquirers are increasingly looking at businesses whose products use AI, depend on AI, or sit close enough to AI that the buyer expects future value from data, automation, software or model-enabled workflows. The target may not be an “AI company” in the headline sense. It may be a medical-device company using machine-learning outputs in a diagnostic workflow, a software platform embedding generative AI in a user interface, a manufacturer using computer vision in quality control, a services business with proprietary datasets and automation, or a consumer brand relying on AI-created marketing assets.
June 9, 2026
Patent enforcement has always required two decisions, not one.
The first is the obvious question: can the patent owner prove infringement and survive the expected validity challenges?
The second is the question that often drives the boardroom discussion: if the case goes badly, how much additional exposure does the plaintiff face?
That second question has become harder to answer. Section 285 of the Patent Act allows a court to award reasonable attorney fees to the prevailing party in “exceptional cases.” Section 1927 can expose counsel personally when an attorney unreasonably and vexatiously multiplies proceedings. Those are serious tools. They are also easy to overstate when a defendant has just won and wants the court to treat the plaintiff’s loss as proof that the case never should have been filed.
June 3, 2026
Consumer packaged goods companies are good at measuring velocity, margin, distribution, shelf position, and repeat purchase. They are often less disciplined about measuring the intellectual property created while those numbers improve.
That gap matters. In CPG, the most valuable innovation is not always the headline product. It may be the closure that reduces leakage, the formulation tweak that stabilizes shelf life, the refill system that changes unit economics, the manufacturing step that saves twenty seconds per batch, the package geometry that makes a club-store pallet work, or the visual identity that turns a commodity into a premium item.
