The year 2024 brought a breadth of noteworthy and significant tax decisions impacting both individual and corporate taxpayers. In the first of a recurring series, this article discusses tax cases from 2024 that we found intriguing and relevant to taxpayers.

On April 18, the Federal Circuit issued a precedential decision in Recentive Analytics, Inc. v. Fox Corp., invalidating under Section 101 of the Patent Act and the two-step Alice test patents using machine learning models. The Federal Circuit acknowledged that “[m]achine learning is a burgeoning and increasingly important field and may lead to patent-eligible improvements in technology.” Nevertheless, the Federal Circuit held that “patents that do no more than claim the application of generic machine learning to new data environments, without disclosing improvements to the machine learning models to be applied, are patent ineligible under § 101.” Although some district courts had previously found claims on machine learning methods patent-ineligible, the Federal Circuit recognized that this case presented “a question of first impression” under its precedent.