Know your IP risk before you ship — not after the lawsuit.
Patently Legal reads live US patents, case law, and copyright records and hands you a plain-English risk memo — with every claim sourced, so you and your lawyer can actually trust it.
You can't see the landmines until you step on one.
Invisible patent thickets
Hundreds of overlapping software and AI patents. Miss one and the suit lands after you've scaled — the worst possible time.
AI lawsuits are landing now
Silverman, Tremblay, the OpenAI cases. If your model touched copyrighted data, the exposure is real and current — not hypothetical.
The open-source license trap
One AGPL dependency deep in your stack can force you to open-source your entire commercial product. Most teams never check.
A lawyer can find all of this — at $600 an hour, after you explain everything from scratch. So most builders just ship and hope.
Describe it. We research it. You get receipts.
Describe your product
One paragraph, plain English. What you're building, what data it uses, how you'll sell it. No legal jargon required.
We read the record
We search 55,000+ patents, 35,000+ court opinions, and copyright registrations in real time — and score what overlaps.
Get a sourced memo
Risk level, overlapping patents, relevant rulings, a fair-use read, and concrete next steps — in about a minute.
Every claim shows its receipts.
Most AI legal tools give you a confident paragraph and hope you don't check. We do the opposite — click any finding and see the exact source and the passage it's based on. If we can't back it, we don't say it.
Sources on every claim
The supporting passage plus a link to the real court or patent record — on every case and every patent we cite.
Is it still good law?
We flag when a later court has criticized or overruled a precedent — and show you the citing passage as proof.
We catch our own contradictions
When our research disagrees with itself across runs, we surface the conflict instead of quietly picking one side.
Copyright claims arising from AI training data — directly relevant to a product built on scraped sources.
“The purpose of the copying weighs against a finding of fair use where the use is commercial.”
Illustrative — this is what a real memo shows
Outcomes, not features.
Catch patent overlap early
Similarity-scored patent matches so you can design around them before you build — not after you've shipped.
Never cite a case that doesn't exist
Every citation is validated against real court records. Zero hallucinated cases, ever.
Spot the AGPL trap
Open-source license risk flagged before a copyleft dependency forces your whole product open.
See which precedents still hold
Good-law checks so you never lean your argument on a case a later court has gutted.
A brief, not a lecture
A structured memo with a clear risk level and next steps you can actually act on today.
Watch your space on autopilot
A daily digest of new filings, grantings, and rulings that match the topics you care about.
Built on public US law — no black box.
Real primary sources, indexed locally and refreshed on a schedule. No opaque enterprise dataset, no markup — just the record, made searchable.
35,000+ US court opinions from CourtListener — searchable by topic, court, and precedential status, embedded for instant search.
55,000+ US patent grants from USPTO Open Data — claims, assignees, and CPC classifications, embedded for semantic overlap scoring.
US Copyright Office public records — registrations and ownership recordations for authorship and chain-of-title checks. Growing through beta.
The questions you're already asking.
Is this legal advice?
No — it's research. Think of it as walking into your lawyer's office with the memo already done, so their expensive hours go to judgment, not gathering.
Does it hallucinate citations?
No. Every case and patent is validated against real records before it appears in a memo. If a source can't be confirmed, it doesn't get cited.
Who is it for?
Founders, indie developers, and product managers shipping AI or software who want a real read on their exposure before they commit resources.
How fast — and what's the cost to try?
A full clearance memo takes about a minute. You can start free, no card required, and upgrade only when it's clearly saving you money.
Start free. Upgrade when it's saving you money.
Ship with your eyes open.
Run your first clearance check free and see exactly where you stand — patents, precedent, and license risk, all sourced.
Research only — not legal advice. See Terms.