Understanding before strategy
A position taken before the record is read is a guess wearing a suit. So the sequence never changes: the patent, then the claims, then the whole of the prosecution history, then the accused product as it was actually built, and only then a view about what to do.
Two engineering degrees and a career that began by writing patents rather than litigating them mean the technical document gets read directly, without a translator standing between the lawyer and the machine. That is not a flourish. It is the difference between arguing about what a claim says and arguing about what somebody told you it says.
Making complexity understandable
Patent cases are decided by people who did not build the technology. A judge has a docket full of matters that have nothing to do with your field. A jury has never seen your product and never will outside a courtroom. Your board reads a two page summary between other things.
If the technology cannot be made clear to each of them, in a form each of them can actually use, the merits of the case do not get to do their work. Clarity is not a communication skill sitting next to the legal one. It is most of the legal one.
Details create leverage
Leverage in a patent case is almost never dramatic. It is a limitation that was added in 2011 to get past a rejection, and that now excludes the very thing the patent owner wants to accuse. It is an inconsistency between what an expert says today and what the inventor said in the application. It is a date on a document that does not fit the story being told about it.
Finding those things is slow. Using them is fast. Pressure applied at one correct point costs a fraction of pressure applied everywhere, and it is far more likely to move the other side, because it tells them that somebody on your side has read the file.
Preparing for what matters
Composure in a courtroom is not a temperament. It is a consequence. What looks like calm at a hearing was assembled months earlier, in the unglamorous work of reading everything, writing out the hard questions, and answering them out loud before anyone hostile asks them.
Preparation also has to be rationed, because a case has more surfaces than any budget can cover. The judgment is in deciding which two or three moments will actually decide the matter, and then over preparing those rather than spreading the same effort evenly across everything.
Teaching is a litigation skill
Before practicing law, the teaching was literal: undergraduate business law, graduate mathematics, and an electrical engineering lab at the University of Missouri. Afterward it became Patent Academy, a training program for patent lawyers built at Shook, Hardy & Bacon, and years of continuing legal education for other attorneys.
A jury is a classroom that did not volunteer to be there. Nobody in it chose the subject, nobody gets to leave, and there is no second lecture. Everything a teacher learns about sequence, about what to leave out, and about knowing when a room has stopped following, applies directly.
Technology amplifies judgment
There was a computer services company, ProSolv, founded to help pay for college. Then analyst work at Accenture. Later, executive education at Wharton on the economics of blockchain and digital assets, and daily use of artificial intelligence in the work now.
A tool that makes a sound judgment faster is worth paying for, and in a document heavy case it can be worth a great deal. A tool used in place of judgment is how a brief gets filed that nobody actually read. The test is simple enough: every output is checked by the person whose name goes on the filing.
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