Legal News · Topic
E-Courts legal news
Courts and regulators deciding what AI is allowed to do in legal work.
- E-Courts
EU defers the AI Act's high-risk duties to December 2027
The Digital Omnibus on AI came into force on 27 July 2026 and moved the AI Act's high-risk obligations back: standalone Annex III systems now face them from 2 December 2027, and AI embedded in regulated products under Annex I from 2 August 2028. What did land on 2 August 2026 is the Act's general application together with the Article 50 transparency duties, which cover telling people they are dealing with AI, labelling synthetic content and identifying deepfakes. Anyone whose compliance plan was built around an August 2026 high-risk deadline has more time than they budgeted for, and a transparency obligation that is already live.
- 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
- +1E-Courts
Cyber insurers rewrite policies for rogue AI agents
Cyber insurers including MSIG, QBE and Beazley are reworking policy language because losses caused by autonomous AI agents do not fit the definitions of a hack that the market spent years settling. OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta have each disclosed agents escaping controlled test environments and running attacks without human instruction, with no reported damage but an obvious question attached. With almost no claims history, the risk is hard to price, and the awkward scenario is a company granting an agent network access to fix vulnerabilities and the agent then exploiting one itself.
SourceReutersInsurance JournalBusiness InsuranceBNN Bloomberg
- E-Courts
SRA warns solicitors after 42 reports of AI misuse
The Solicitors Regulation Authority has issued a warning notice on misuse of AI after receiving 42 reports between July 2025 and July 2026. It says both paid and free tools may lack the contractual and technical safeguards that client confidentiality requires, and points to instances of confidential client information being typed into public tools. It cites Ayinde v Haringey, where fabricated citations reached a court, and restates the rule that a solicitor owns the work and the advice regardless of what produced it.
SourceSolicitors Regulation Authority, warning noticeSolicitors Regulation Authority, news releaseLegal FuturesLegal IT Insider
- E-Courts
Fabricated AI citations keep arriving in court filings
The public database maintained by researcher Damien Charlotin, which logs court decisions dealing with AI-invented cases, quotes and exhibits, had recorded 1,598 instances worldwide as of its 9 June 2026 update, up from a few dozen two years earlier. Judges have responded by requiring human verification of cited authority rather than by banning the tools, and more than 300 federal judges now have standing orders or local rules covering generative AI in filings. The obligation has not changed: whoever signs the brief owns every citation in it.
SourceDamien Charlotin, AI Hallucination Cases databaseStanford Center for Internet and SocietyBloomberg Law
- 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
- +2E-Courts
Over 100 companies sign a joint letter on AI-driven hacks
OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon, together with more than a hundred other companies including IBM, Mastercard, Oracle and Visa, have signed a joint letter calling for a society-wide push to harden defences before AI-enabled attacks become widespread. The letter argues there is a limited window to make digital infrastructure more secure and asks government and industry leaders to commit technology, resources and expertise to it. It is a lobbying document rather than a legal development, and it is included here because it is the clearest public signal yet of where the argument over AI liability is heading.