United States
6 stories
The largest legal market, and the loudest.
California AI bill for lawyers faces a 31 August deadline(artificiallawyer.com)
SB 574 would write AI duties into California practice rules: protect confidential client information at the prompt stage, guard against discriminatory use, and personally read and verify every source cited in a filing you sign, AI-generated or not. It would also bar arbitrators from delegating any part of a decision to a model. The bill cleared the Senate 39-0 in January and sits with the Assembly, which has until 31 August to pass it, so anyone practising in California should know whether it lands before planning next quarter's AI rollout.
E-Courts4 sources
Texas court shields a litigant's AI chat log from discovery(nortonrosefulbright.com)
The Eleventh Division of the Texas Business Court held that a chat log of a non-lawyer litigant's exchanges with a generative AI tool, created in anticipation of litigation, is protected attorney work product under the Texas rules. Judge Grant Dorfman declined to follow United States v. Heppner, the February decision from the Southern District of New York that reached the opposite result on the federal standard, reasoning that the Texas rule is written differently and on its face reaches these conversations. The party must still disclose which discovery materials it fed into the tool, so the protection covers the conversation and not the documents behind it.
E-Courts4 sources
Harvey wires PacerPro docket data into litigation work(harvey.ai)
Harvey and PacerPro have integrated so that litigation teams working in Harvey can reach their firm's own filing history alongside live state and federal dockets. PacerPro captures filings and their documents as they post and ties each one to its case and matter, which turns a new filing or order into something that can trigger work rather than something somebody has to notice. For litigation groups the pitch is that the court event, the matter context and the firm's prior work arrive in the same place.
PartnershipHarvey, PacerPro3 sources
Privilege shields Workday's bias-testing data in Mobley(blogs.duanemorris.com)
Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler refused to make Workday hand over its AI bias-testing data in Mobley v. Workday, holding it privileged because the company's lawyers curated the testing and used the results to give legal advice, and that merely acknowledging the testing existed did not waive that. She also found Workday lacked Rule 34 control over its customers' applicant data, while ordering it to produce its own EEO-1 and OFCCP records. For anyone bias-testing a hiring model, whether counsel directs the work now looks like the thing that decides whether the results are discoverable.
E-CourtsWorkday4 sources
Discernis raises $2.5M to read every document in a case(app.dealroom.co)
Discernis, a New York startup, has raised a $2.5m seed led by Newfund Capital, with Triple Impact Capital, Remarkable Ventures and C2 Ventures taking part. Its claim is that it reads every document in a case file rather than sampling a subset, at a stated rate above 50,000 documents an hour, to surface evidence that only appears when the whole record is read. Founder Rob Kwiatkowski came from AWS, where he worked on reinforcement learning from human feedback.
FundraisingDiscernis3 sources
Reed Smith and Lineal team up on AI-led investigations(reedsmith.com)
Reed Smith Legal Solutions and legal technology provider Lineal announced a collaboration to run corporate and regulatory investigations as a data analysis problem rather than a conventional eDiscovery exercise, using generative AI, analytics and visualisation across enterprise data. The two say they have spent the past year developing the approach together. No product, pricing, client, headcount or launch date is named, so for now this is a direction of travel for buyers of investigation services rather than something anyone can purchase.
PartnershipReed Smith, Lineal1 source