Mr. McDonald's practice emphasizes technology-related intellectual property litigation, including strategic litigation arising from contract-based disputes. He also regularly advises on matters of constitutional and statutory law relating to political parties.

Much of Mr. McDonald's practice has focused on software-related disputes. Before obtaining his law degree he worked as a computer programmer for an oil company and as a research assistant at the Dynamic Modeling Group of Project MAC at MIT. He has represented Microsoft Corporation in significant litigation since 1986, including leading the company’s defense in the historic Apple v. Microsoft “look and feel” litigation.

Mr. McDonald holds seven software-related patents. He is the sole inventor of a system and method for efficiently processing messages stored in multiple message stores, and a co-inventor of six systems and methods for efficiently evaluating a structured message store for message redundancy, including message threads, processing the message store to identify unique and duplicate messages and for near duplicates, and identifying and categorizing messages extracted from an archived message store.