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- E-Courts
Texas court shields a litigant's AI chat log from discovery
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.
SourceNorton Rose FulbrightFoley & LardnerOgletree DeakinsSpencer Fane
- E-Courts
Privilege shields Workday's bias-testing data in Mobley
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.
SourceDuane Morris Class Action DefenseNorton Rose FulbrightThe order (PDF)Law360
- Fundraising
Discernis raises $2.5M to read every document in a case
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.
- Partnership
Reed Smith and Lineal team up on AI-led investigations
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.
SourceReed Smith