The first week

Seven days, in order

Confirm the real date Day one

What to do

Find the actual date your response is due in your case, from the papers you were served and the rules of the court named on them. In federal court the answer is generally due twenty-one days after service, and that date moves with a waiver of service or an agreed extension.

Why

Every other decision gets scheduled off that one date, and the general figure is not your figure. It is specific to your court, your case, and how you were served. Assuming twenty-one days when it was actually sixty costs you six weeks of planning. Assuming sixty when it was twenty-one is far worse.

Stop the automatic deletion Day one

What to do

Suspend routine automatic deletion of email, chat, files and backups relating to the accused product, and tell the people who keep those systems running to leave them alone until someone says otherwise. That includes the archives nobody has opened in years.

Why

Courts treat the loss of that material very seriously, and a deletion policy that ran on schedule is not an excuse once a dispute is foreseeable. This is the single most common way a company turns a defensible case into a bad one, and it happens by doing nothing at all.

Call the insurance broker This week

What to do

Ask your broker, in writing, whether any policy the business carries covers intellectual property defense, and give notice of the claim if the answer is yes or even maybe.

Why

Some business policies do cover it, and late notice can forfeit coverage that you were otherwise entitled to. The call costs nothing and takes ten minutes. It is the highest return on time available to you this week.

Keep speculation out of email Starting now

What to do

Tell your team, plainly, to stop writing guesses about the patent, the other company, or whether anyone thinks the product might be covered. No amateur legal conclusions, no jokes about it, no theories in a group chat.

Why

Whether infringement was willful is very often argued from internal messages, and a court can increase an award by up to three times where willfulness is found. A one-line joke written this week can be read aloud two years from now by someone who does not find it funny.

Gather four things This week

What to do

The patent numbers being asserted. Everything you have received, with the date each item arrived and how. A plain description of how your product actually works, written by someone who built it. The names of the people who built it and when.

Why

Every lawyer you interview will ask for exactly this, and the ones who do not are not the ones to hire. Having it ready shortens the first conversation from an hour of hunting to twenty minutes of substance, and you will be paying for that hour.

Read the claims yourself This week

What to do

Open the asserted patent, go past the drawings and the description to the numbered sentences at the back, and read the first one slowly with your product in front of you, one element at a time.

Why

Those numbered sentences are the property line, and every element of one has to be present for literal infringement. A patent can look enormous and still have claims that miss what you sell entirely. You will not settle the question in an evening, but you will stop being frightened of a document you have not read.

Interview more than one lawyer This week

What to do

Talk to at least two, and ask each of them the same questions so the answers can be compared. Ask what they would decline to spend your money on before you ask what they charge.

Why

Patent litigation is a long relationship, and the difference between counsel who understands your technology directly and counsel who will hire someone to explain it shows up in the bill every month for years. One conversation is not a comparison.