This summer, North Carolina Lawyers Weekly named me to its inaugural North Carolina Legal 250 in the Intellectual Property category. I’m honored to be included.
The Legal 250 is a new annual feature that recognizes 250 attorneys across the state, organized by practice area. Members of North Carolina’s legal community nominated the honorees, and the Lawyers Weekly editors made the final selections. To whoever put my name forward: thank you.
You can read the full Lawyers Weekly profile here: North Carolina Legal 250: John Kivus.
My path to this practice started early. In second grade, my father and I built a custom PC together, and I’ve wanted to know how software works ever since. I worked as a software engineer before I became a lawyer, so when Lawyers Weekly asked about my practice, the answer was easy: “I’m all about software.”
That background shapes my work. Most of my practice is litigation for software and technology companies: disputes over software licensing and ownership, along with the copyright, trade secret, and computer fraud claims that tend to come with them under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA), and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). I also litigate trademark enforcement and defense cases in the North Carolina Business Court and in federal court, handle proceedings before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, and defend domain name holders in UDRP disputes. This year, our intellectual property team won summary judgment for two healthcare organizations in a federal trademark case, and the court went on to grant our clients an exceptional-case fee award under the Lanham Act.
A good share of my work happens before anyone files suit. I help software companies avoid disputes by spotting practical risks in their contracts, development processes, and commercial relationships. And as a longtime pop culture fan, I advise authors, artists, comic book creators, and photographers on protecting their intellectual property rights and commercializing their creative work.
I write and speak about these issues, too, especially where artificial intelligence meets copyright law. My article, Generative AI and Copyright Law: A Misalignment That Could Lead to the Privatization of Copyright Enforcement, appeared in the North Carolina Journal of Law & Technology, and I spoke on a panel at the journal’s symposium on intellectual property and AI.
If you’re choosing a lawyer for a software dispute, here are the questions I’d ask anyone you’re considering, me included:
- THE CODE: Can they read your code and talk with your engineering team directly? Software cases often turn on technical details that get lost in translation.
- THE CLAIMS: Have they litigated the intellectual property and contract claims likely to come up in your dispute (breach of a software license, copyright, trade secret, computer fraud, or trademark) in the court where your case will be heard?
- THE COST: Will they talk early and plainly about budget, fee exposure (including the chance of paying the other side’s fees), and how the dispute might end?
- WHAT COMES NEXT: Will they help you fix the contract or process that caused the problem so it doesn’t happen again?
Thank you to my clients, who trust me with problems that matter to their businesses, and to Chris Jackson and my colleagues at Morningstar Law Group. If something about a license, a codebase, or a competitor has you concerned, please reach out. I’d love to hear what you’re building.
– John
