For the past two years, the legal conversation around Generative AI has been reactive—focused almost entirely on copyright infringement lawsuits and data scraping disputes. However, as enterprise software companies move from "experimenting" with AI to "deploying" it at scale, the focus is shifting toward long-term governance and IP hygiene. In response, Shield & Signal is officially launching our AI Integrity Practice.

This new cross-disciplinary group brings together our veteran IP litigators with specialists in data privacy and licensing. The goal is to move beyond the courtroom and help our software clients build "litigation-ready" development pipelines. This includes auditing training datasets for IP provenance, drafting model-as-a-service (MaaS) agreements that clearly define derivative work ownership, and implementing internal controls to prevent the accidental leakage of trade secrets into public LLMs.

Led by Partner Elena Vance, the practice will specifically serve our core clientele in the SaaS and digital media sectors. We believe that the winners in the AI era will not just be the companies with the best models, but those with the cleanest legal title to their outputs. Our AI Integrity Practice is designed to provide that certainty in an era of profound regulatory ambiguity.