White Smoke
A small newsletter on legaltech
AI
An AI-generated video of a man killed in a road-rage incident in 2021 was presented in court this week as a victim impact statement during sentencing [The Guardian ($) | ABA Journal ($) | ABC15 TV] | 404 Media ($)]
The Food and Drug Administration has hired its first AI Chief
Meta is considering adding facial recognition features to its smart glasses and future wearables
Vals, which issued a major benchmarking survey in legal AI tasks and services, is now soliciting vendors of legal research GenAI tools for a legal research-specific benchmark study
OpenAI has backed down from its plan to convert its corporate structure from non-profit to for-profit [Axios | CNBC | Politico]
More from the New York Times [$] on the finding that hallucinations and errors can increase within the new reasoning LLM models, rather than decrease
A conservative activist is suing Meta for defamation in Delaware state court after discovering that Meta AI fabricated that the man was involved in the January 6, 2021 events at the U.S. Capitol [Reason | Complaint | Docket | Law firm blog post | Wall Street Journal ($) | NBC]
Not a Fabrication Folly: a judge found no problems with an expert using an AI chatbot to confirm their already-formed opinions [Reason | Docket | Memorandum of Decision & Order]
The California Privacy Protection Agency is backing down on enforcing draft regulations targeting AI developers, after pressure from business groups and Gov. Newsom
Blockchain/Digital Currency
From Reuters [$]: “A stablecoin launched by Donald Trump's World Liberty Financial crypto venture is being used by an Abu Dhabi investment firm for its $2 billion investment in [a cryptocurrency exchange], one of World Liberty's co-founders said”
Data Privacy
A clone of the Signal messaging app that is being used by members of the current administration, has been hacked [404 Media ($) | PC Mag | Bleeping Computer]
TikTok has been fined €530 million by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission for allegedly sending European user data to China and not warning users of the data transfers [Politico | DPC press release | TikTok response]
Miscellaneous
A bill has been introduced in the California State Senate to require an audit of disastrous February 2025 bar exam, and the contracts that the State Bar signed with vendors for the exam [CA LegInfo | Bill text]
Related: Leah Wilson, the Executive Director of the California State Bar, will resign on July 7th
Long Reads
Dahl, M., 2025. Bye-bye, Bluebook? Automating Legal Procedure with Large Language Models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.02763.