Bigfoot Biomedical®, a Milpitas, CA emerging company, recently announced that it has secured new financing of up to $57 million in combined debt and equity financing from Madryn Asset Management LP, an alternative asset management firm that invests in innovative healthcare companies specializing in unique and transformative products, technologies, and services. Founded in 2014, Bigfoot focused on broadening access to innovative solutions for people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Bigfoot Biomedical is…

Owning a federal trademark registration provides the ability to exclude others from using a certain word or design in association with specific goods or services. In the United States this exclusivity of rights, however, can also derive from actual use in commerce without a federal registration. In this case, it is critical to pinpoint the earliest date of use in commerce in order to prove to be the first to have used a certain mark…

Patent examiners operate under a complex network of production and quality incentives that influence the likelihood that an examiner will allow or reject a given patent application. In an empirical study published in the American Intellectual Property Law Association Quarterly Journal (summary available here), my co-author and I (both former examiners) detailed incentive policies at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and analyzed how those policies impact patent quality and examiner decision-making. By…

Founders of emerging companies must decide early on in their company’s growth cycle whether to require employees to assign their inventions (including rights to patent and patent applications –collectively “patent rights”) to the company.  This post provides a non-exhaustive analytical framework for founders to consider when making such decisions. Understanding Patent Ownership Under US patent law, ownership of patent rights includes the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering to sell, or importing…