Software & Computing

Software patents live or die at eligibility. We draft for that.

Since Alice, a software patent's fate is largely decided by how the specification frames the technical problem and the concrete improvement to computer functionality. That framing is a drafting decision, made years before anyone raises Section 101.

Published patents in this area: 4,832
Professionals: 21

We prosecute and defend patents across distributed systems and cloud infrastructure, networking and telecommunications protocols, databases and data processing, operating systems, user interfaces, and e-commerce and financial technology. Security and cryptography are handled in Cybersecurity, and industrial control systems in Industrial Automation.

The practice reaches from start-ups filing their first application to Fortune 500 portfolios spanning many families.

Framing the technical problem

The eligibility question is usually decided by the first few paragraphs of the specification. An application that opens by describing a business need and then recites a computer implementing it invites an Alice rejection. One that opens with a technical deficiency in existing systems — latency, memory pressure, a synchronization failure, a security property that cannot be maintained at scale — and describes the architecture that resolves it is arguing eligibility before anyone raises it.

Both applications may describe the same invention. They do not fare the same.

Distributed systems and the divided infringement problem

Cloud and networked inventions distribute their steps across parties: a client, a server, a CDN, a third-party service. A method claim requiring all of them is a claim no single defendant performs, and the case law on divided infringement makes that a very hard problem to litigate around after the fact.

The fix is at drafting: claim from the perspective of each actor separately, so that at least one claim is infringed entirely by the party you would actually sue.

Evidence

Patents we drafted in this area

Patents the firm prosecuted, drawn from its own published listing and from the USPTO's attorney-of-record index. A record, not a claim.

All patent listings

12,750,778Wireless communication device and wireless communication method
12,750,319Management of protocol data unit set discarding due to network congestion
12,750,187Sounding reference signal transmission optimization with carrier aggregation
12,750,186Sounding reference signal transmission optimization
12,750,133Satellite communications tunneling protocol for a space mesh network
12,749,472Additive manufacturing of resonant metasurfaces for noise cancellation
12,749,038Digital worker skill overlap mitigation
12,748,702Utilizing a lock manager for a cluster-level write back cache