AI and the Law: How Companies Can Navigate IP Risk and Seize Opportunity

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we have a conversation with two shareholders from Wolf Greenfield. Ed Rassavage and John Strand were both speakers on our recently concluded AI 2025 program. As the program was concluding, and in front of a live studio audience, we sat down to discuss the current state of the industry from a client’s perspective. 

“It’s a lot of wait-and-see unfortunately,” Strand said. “The companies that have come to us for risk assessments mostly are mid-sized to larger companies that are very data heavy driven companies that are looking to use AI to enhance their data and extract value from it in some new way.” 

For Russavage, who is a patent attorney with 30 years of experience working in the software industry, the question for many clients relates to patent strategy, which can be extremely important given that so many AI companies are small companies, but the industry has some very large players. “We just tell folks file early file often and try to file something good. We use a lot of provisionals these days. Filing them within the matter of weeks or months not not years…So, it's it's a little bit more aggressive than it was for just typical software companies in the AI realm.”

Our conversation then pivoted to trade secrets, and the role of trade secrets for AI companies given that the data and insights gained from data can be extremely valuable. From here we proceed to discuss trademarks and the problems presented by an immature industry that hasn’t yet settled on what terms are generic and how that will impact trademark selection (and retention) and whether and to what extent AI platforms will face copyright infringement liability for using training data without permission and for the outputs from generative AI tools. 

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