Tertiary sources
A small newsletter on legaltech
AI
From Bob Ambrogi: “To A Sometimes ‘Shell-Shocked’ ClioCon Audience, Jack Newton Presented Clio’s Vision for a New Era of AI-Driven Legal Work”
Vals AI has released a benchmarking report on GenAI tools and legal research, finding that the tools tested (including ChatGPT) performed better than lawyers [ Report | Law.com ($) | Artificial Lawyer | Legal Cheek]
[ed. note: I’m nervous about a lot of things regarding GenAI, but losing my job in the next six months because I can be wholly or mostly replaced by one of these tools … no]
A teenage girl in New Jersey is suing an AI developer for its ‘nudify’ app that was used by a classmate to create deepfake nude images of her based on a social media picture [WSJ ($) | Ars Technica | Docket | Complaint]
Salesforce is being sued in a class action suit alleging that the company used pirated books under copyright to train its large language models [Reuters ($) | Decrypt | Docket | Complaint]
Activist Robby Starbuck is suing Google for defamation in Delaware state court, alleging that its AI tools has included hallucinated errors in AI-generated bios of him [Verge | WSJ ($) | Complaint]
The creator of an AI painting that generated controversy when the painting won a state-wide art contest in Colorado is still fighting for copyright protection over the work, while preparing to sell oil-based prints of the picture [404 Media ($) | Docket | Motion for Summary Judgment]
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill last week that adds provisions to the state’s Cartwright Act, to cover pricing algorithms [Bill info | Pillsbury | Vinson & Elkins | Rep. Aguiar-Curry’s press release ]
Reddit is suing GenAI search engine developer Perplexity and several data scrapers for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) by using “industrial scraping” techniques on Reddit’s forums [Axios | Verge | Docket | Complaint]
From The Hollywood Reporter: “OpenAI’s CEO brazenly regurgitated major studios’ characters to allow video app Sora 2 to spit out clips tailor-made for users. Insiders at the major agencies are alarmed — and some wonder whether the studios are doing enough”
Blockchain/Digital Currency
The blockchain partner of PayPal accidentally minted $300 trillion in stablecoins in a technical error; the coins were destroyed shortly thereafter
There appears to be a growing push for the “tokenization” of stocks in the U.S. that would allow for stock trading via blockchain technology [CoinDesk | Investopedia | Yahoo! Finance | Reuters ($)]
Data Privacy
Users of the Oura Ring have reacted negatively to signaling by the company of its close relationship to the U.S. Department of Defense
Hackers using stolen Salesforce data have built dossiers of U.S. government officials numbering into the “tens of thousands … including NSA employees,” according to 404 Media [$]
Amazon’s Ring is partnering with Flock Safety to allow easier sharing of footage from Ring cameras with law enforcement [CNBC | Techcrunch | Engadget]
Related: From Verge: “Ring’s CEO says his cameras can almost ‘zero out crime’ within the next 12 months”
Long Reads
King, J., Klyman, K., Capstick, E., Saade, T. and Hsieh, V., 2025, October. User Privacy and Large Language Models: An Analysis of Frontier Developers’ Privacy Policies. In Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 1465-1477) [Abstract | Summary]
Chen, S., Gao, M., Sasse, K. et al. When helpfulness backfires: LLMs and the risk of false medical information due to sycophantic behavior. npj Digit. Med. 8, 605 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-025-02008-z [Summary]
Chakrabarty, T., Ginsburg, J.C. and Dhillon, P., 2025. Readers Prefer Outputs of AI Trained on Copyrighted Books over Expert Human Writers, arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.13939
Whelan, Mike, AI in Practice [Podcast]: AI in Practice is where modern lawyers pull back the curtain on how they’re integrating AI into their practice. Hosted by Mike Whelan (Lawyer Forward), it’s an inside look at the challenges, surprises, and breakthroughs that come with bringing AI into their work and firms
Iftikhar, Z., Xiao, A., Ransom, S., Huang, J., & Suresh, H., How LLM Counselors Violate Ethical Standards in Mental Health Practice: A Practitioner-Informed Framework, Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 8(2), 1311-1323 (2025) https://doi.org/10.1609/aies.v8i2.36632