Many in-house lawyers inherit export controls without warning. One day it is contracts or IP; the next day someone tells you engineering, HR, and IT are now an “export risk.” That is not an exaggeration. EAR and ITAR regulate who inside your company is legally allowed to know what. Export controls are not mainly about shipping products. They are about information . Design drawings, source code, test data, manufacturing processes, and technical manuals can all become regulated

After our last post on the vocabulary of startup funding, a few founders followed up with a similar reaction: “Okay, I understand what a seed round or Series A is. But what do I actually do now?” That question usually comes at a very specific moment. The product exists in some form. There’s early interest—maybe a pilot customer or two. The founder has started hearing phrases like “traction,” “runway,” and “institutional capital,” often in the same week. This is typically wher

If you are building a startup in Michigan, fundraising can feel opaque—not because capital is unavailable, but because it comes in stages , each with its own logic, expectations, and tradeoffs. This post is meant to demystify those stages by explaining why they exist, what they are designed to fund, and how Michigan founders typically experience them. Rather than treating funding rounds as labels, it helps to see them as checkpoints in a company’s development. Each round answ

For more than a decade, § 101 has been the dark cloud over U.S. patent practice. Even companies with sophisticated R&D pipelines routinely find themselves stuck in eligibility quicksand, watching well-designed innovations get bounced as “abstract ideas” or “mere data processing.” Yet the surprising truth is this: the companies that consistently avoid § 101 headaches aren’t doing anything exotic. They aren’t filing longer applications, or denser ones, or even necessarily more

Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly transforming industries and businesses. Governments worldwide are catching up. Expect new laws...