Welcome to Doctrine & Data—a blog about intellectual property law through an empirical lens.
I’m Thomas Reichert, an IP attorney and Assistant Professor of Law at Southern Illinois University Simmons School of Law. My work sits at the intersection of legal doctrine and empirical analysis, asking a simple question: Does the law work the way we think it does?
What This Blog Is About
Legal doctrine is full of multifactor tests, balancing frameworks, and totality-of-the-circumstances analyses. Courts and practitioners treat these frameworks as if every factor matters, as if the careful weighing of numerous considerations is what produces just outcomes.
But what if that’s not actually how decisions get made?
My recent research on trademark confusion doctrine—analyzing thousands of TTAB decisions—found that the traditional thirteen-factor DuPont test effectively collapses to just two factors. Mark similarity and goods relatedness predict outcomes with over 99% accuracy. The other eleven factors? Largely noise.
This blog will explore questions like these across intellectual property law and beyond:
- Trademark doctrine: What do the data tell us about how confusion is actually decided?
- Patent practice: Insights from prosecution, examination, and litigation
- Empirical legal studies: Methodology, findings, and implications for practice
- Law and technology: Including the growing role of AI in legal analysis and practice
Who This Is For
I write for practitioners who want actionable insights, academics interested in empirical approaches to doctrine, and anyone curious about what the data reveal when we look closely at how law actually operates.
The tone here will be rigorous but (I hope) readable. Complex ideas deserve clear explanations, and empirical findings should translate into practical understanding.
What’s Next
In upcoming posts, I’ll dig deeper into the DuPont findings and their implications for trademark practice, explore what similar methods might reveal in other areas of IP, and comment on developments in the field as they arise.
If you’d like to follow along, you can subscribe via RSS or connect with me on LinkedIn.
Learn More
- Visit reichert.law to learn more about my academic research and consulting services.
- Read the full paper: Doctrine, Data, and the Death of DuPont on SSRN.
Thanks for reading.
—TR