The first days after a complaint arrives
Route the papers to counsel immediately. The time to respond runs from service rather than from the day the right person reads it, and letting it pass can cost a company far more than the underlying dispute ever would. Before anything else we usually put a litigation hold in place so that engineering notes, design files, sales records and email are preserved instead of being cleared on the ordinary schedule. Resist the urge to circulate an internal opinion about whether the product reads on the patent, because that kind of message is rarely privileged and often surfaces later in the case. If you are the one considering filing a patent infringement lawsuit, the same urgency applies in reverse: what you can actually prove about the accused product, and what has already been said publicly about your own patent, both shape whether a complaint is worth filing at all.
Who else may be on the hook
You are often not the only party with exposure. If the accused feature came from a supplier or a component vendor, your purchase terms may carry an indemnity clause obligating them to defend or reimburse you, and those clauses usually impose notice requirements of their own. Pull the contracts before you answer, not afterward. Insurance is the other place to look, since some general liability and technology errors and omissions policies respond to intellectual property or advertising injury claims, and carriers frequently decline late notice even where coverage would otherwise have applied. It also matters whether your customers received letters or were named as defendants alongside you, because a patent owner who reaches your customers is applying pressure to you, and in many supply relationships the manufacturer steps in and takes over that defense.
What the opening posture depends on
Two questions shape the early strategy. The first is what is actually being accused: a complaint may name a whole product line while the patent claims reach only one feature, and pinning that down usually changes how serious the matter looks. The second is where the case sits, because the court and the judge assigned to it affect scheduling, local practice and the realistic cost of defending. Who filed matters as well, since a competitor and a licensing entity that sells nothing want very different things out of the same case. We also look at whether the patent has been asserted before and how those matters ended, which often says more about the other side's appetite than the complaint does. None of this has to be settled at once, but each of these questions depends on facts that take time to gather.
