GenAI Folie à deux
A small newsletter on legaltech
[Editorial note: It is the end of the academic year for me, so this newsletter is going to monthly until late August. The next issue will be sometime in June. Thanks for your readership and support]
AI
Attorneys at KL Gates and Ellis George LP have been jointly fined US$31,000 for submitting fictitious case citations in a supplemental brief to the Special Master in a case [Docket | Order | Verge | Reason]
An ethics complaint has been filed against a recently-elected judge in Broward County; the charges include using a deepfake recording of other judges as part of her campaign [South Florida Sun Sentinel | Bloomberg Law ($) | Docket | Notice of Formal Charges]
The current Congressional budget reconciliation bill has a new provision that would ban all state-passed laws & regulations relating to artificial intelligence for the next 10 years [ 404 Media ($) | Ars Technica | STAT News]
The judge in the OpenAI Copyright Infringement case, brought by the NY Times and other news organizations, has ordered OpenAI to “preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going forward basis until further order of the Court,” which some view as a prohibition against deletion of any queries input into ChatGPT, even those for accounts that provide deletion features [Docket | Order | Keith Lee - LinkedIn | MLex ($) | OpenAI’s letter requesting reconsideration of order]
From the Financial Times [$]: “English regulators have approved a new law firm that uses artificial intelligence instead of lawyers to offer services for as little as £2, as the technology continues to disrupt industries from finance to accounting” [Archival version]
The Virginia State Bar recently closed its public comment period on a proposed legal ethics opinion on GenAI use and reasonable fees [Commentary by Nicole Black]
One of my favorite legaltech sites has a new AI columnist, Jennifer Case: “AI Was Supposed to Democratize Legal Research. What Happened?”
From Lawcom [$]: “Can AI Avatars Expand Court Accessibility? Experts See Potential”
Currently, only 8% of Americans would pay extra for a product with AI assistant features, according to a recent survey
Fabrication Follies
Ayinde, R v. The London Borough of Haringey (England & Wales High Court - Administrative Division) [Judgment | Legal Futures article]
Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC [Docket | Reuters ($) | StereoGum | Declaration]
Keaau Development Partnership LLC v. Lawrence (HI Inter. Court of Appeals) [Order]
Ko v. Li (Ontario Superior Court, CanLII) [ LawSites | Endorsement/Order]
Ramirez v. El Tri MX Restaurant & Bar Corp [Docket | Order | Reason article]
Blockchain/digital currency
A crackdown on crypto & money-laundering scam accounts on the messaging app Telegram has led to the announced shutdown of a Chinese-language black market site, rumored to be the largest ever on the Internet [Wired ($) | Ars Technica]
A group of researchers from Princeton University have found a way to hack an agentic AI-based framework for crypto transactions by injecting false memories into the AI agent
Data Privacy
Google will pay US$1.375 billion, in a settlement of two lawsuits, to the State of Texas over data privacy violations involving geolocation, incognito mode & biometric data [TX AG press release | Verge | CNBC]
European data privacy organization noyb has sent a cease & desist letter to Meta over its announcement that it would begin using personal data posted to Facebook and Instagram from European users to train its AI product, Meta.AI, arguing that the model is not compliant with the GDPR
An automated license plate reader company plans to amass, combine and sell personal data from sources such as web scraping, data brokers and even hacks/data breaches [404 Media ($)]
Miscellaneous
Waymo recalled over 1200 of its robotaxis for a software update after several accidents where the self-driving vehicles hit gates, chains and other barriers [Reuters ($) | Los Angeles Times]
Long Reads(ish)
U.S. Copyright Office, "Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Part 3: Generative AI Training (pre-publication version), May 2025, https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-3-Generative-AI-Training-Report-Pre-Publication-Version.pdf
(Summaries and commentary: ChatGPT Is Eating The World | Publishers Weekly | JD Supra | Patently-O])
Rawles, Lee & Susskind, Richard, “Perplexed about AI? Richard Susskind wants to help” [Podcast], ABA Journal: Modern Law Library, May 7, 2025
Related: A review of Susskind’s book, “How to Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed,” from Attorney At Work
Li, Belinda Z., Been Kim, and Zi Wang. "QuestBench: Can LLMs ask the right question to acquire information in reasoning tasks?" 2025 arXiv preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22674.