A competitor just patented something we were already doing. What are our options?

The United States has been first-to-file since 2013, so doing it first, by itself, wins nothing. What matters is what was public before the competitor's earliest effective filing date: public activity of yours that predates their filing is potential prior art against their claims. Internal, confidential use is different territory: US law provides a prior commercial use defense for certain qualifying activity, but it is deliberately narrow and fact-dependent, and whether yours qualifies is squarely a question for counsel.

So the first 30 days are about preservation, not reaction. Collect dated evidence of what you were doing and when: release notes, invoices, shipping records, specifications, lab notebooks, archived pages. Do it before memories fade and systems get migrated, because every later option is built on this record.

Challenging validity means showing the patent office or a court that the claims were not new or were obvious when filed, using your prior public activity and anything else a professional search surfaces. Proceedings range widely in cost: ex parte reexamination is the modest end, while published estimates for an inter partes review through a final decision commonly run into the mid six figures. The prior-use defense, where it applies, protects your continued operation specifically, leaves the patent standing for everyone else, and has strict conditions counsel must assess. Designing around means reading the granted claims precisely and engineering your product outside them, which is often the fastest and cheapest resolution and occasionally produces patentable inventions of its own. Licensing, finally, is sometimes the rational outcome when the patent looks solid and the redesign looks expensive: a negotiated cost beats an uncontrolled one.

These paths are not exclusive. A credible invalidity position strengthens a license negotiation; a design-around in progress caps your downside while a challenge proceeds. The expensive mistake is choosing a path before the evidence and the claim analysis are on the table.

Patent counsel owns the legal layer: validity and infringement opinions, the prior-use analysis, any PTAB proceeding or litigation, and the license negotiation's legal terms. The analytical layer underneath is consulting work, and it is most of the total effort: prior art searching across patents and literature, claim charts mapping their claims against your product and the art, landscape context, and facilitated design-around invention. ipCG has supplied exactly this support to clients and their counsel since 1998, including structured invent-around sessions that turn a blocking claim into a redesign with its own filings.

One more honest note: ignoring a competitor's patent you know about carries legal risk that counsel should size for you. The quiet, fast move is an assessment, not a reaction or a panic.