Startup entrepreneurs love "disruption"—a buzzword that has come to mean sweeping out old models of delivery or consumption and replacing them with technological alternatives—but their lawyers often do not. The law can be slow to change, and its application to any new technology is never totally predictable. Just ask Aereo, the company that sought to disrupt television viewing with its miniature antenna technology until the U.S. Supreme Court shut it down last year. But even where the law itself may not "disrupt," it does tend to adapt. Courts confronting novel issues of law often are inclined to look for analogies, molding older precedent to accommodate new situations.