AI Topic
Legal-tech, law-firm AI, and AI copyright/IP cases. Curated and summarized from dozens of sources by AIBriefs. RSS
Stephen Aarons was fined $5,000 and held in direct contempt for a ChatGPT-generated appeal brief containing false testimony from wholly fabricated witnesses, including Officer Michelle Amarillo and Teresa Marquez. The court referred him to a disciplinary board, citing a lack of remorse and concern for his client.
Proposed class action filed in federal court in Chicago alleges Meta harvested Facebook and Instagram photos without consent to train Emu and Muse Image and to build NameTag, an unreleased face-recognition feature for its smart glasses. The suit cites Illinois and California privacy laws; NameTag code was found embedded in the Meta glasses app, downloaded over 50 million times.
Bloomberg's Everybody's Business podcast discusses US court cases where chatbots act as lawyers, witnesses, or allegedly help plan a mass shooting. Businessweek contributor Evan Ratliff joins hosts Stacey Vanek Smith and Max Chafkin.
Juro's Claude connector now lets users search document content and smartfields, analyze for risks or unusual terms, and write and review contracts from a Claude conversation. Third-party contracts can be triaged, AI-reviewed against configured intake rules, then routed to the correct approver.
UMG and ElevenLabs signed a multi-year licensing and product-development deal to build a platform for remixes, mashups, track interpretations, and personalized vocals from UMG's licensed catalog. Artists opt in; the platform stays separate from ElevenLabs' ElevenMusic tool and Music API.
Independent artists should keep five records — written consent scope, creation files, change logs, file control, and payment trails — to defend AI voice and likeness disputes. The U.S. Copyright Office has recommended federal protection against unauthorized digital replicas of a person's voice or likeness.
Andreas Thom says OpenAI's non-sofic groups result built heavily on prior work by him and Gábor Kun, and that his ChatGPT and Codex interactions may have fed the model. OpenAI quietly amended its writeup after criticism; Tristan Buckmaster raised similar concerns.
Jean-Rémi de Maistre writes that legal AI's real risk is unpredictability, not just hallucination: systems may summarize cases correctly yet fail to quote a judgment verbatim. He argues general-purpose AI and legal workflow platforms are converging on the lawyer's interface, while substantive research needs domain-specific retrieval and auditable reasoning.
Clauze, founded by former White & Case Riyadh executive partner Waad Alkurini, offers contract review, governance, due diligence and a VDR with bilingual support and full Saudi data residency. White & Case has no publicly announced prior investment of this type.
Suno v6 was trained from scratch on licensed music from Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe, replacing the data used for prior models. Three variants ship: v6 and v6-wild for paying users, v6-mini free for all; older models are retired.
Reddit users say Suno's V6 model is a downgrade from earlier versions after Warner Music forced the shutdown of its original model. The post claims Warner is lobbying governments worldwide to restrict AI training.
Chamelio's Agent Hub lets in-house lawyers deploy AI agents that run continuously, monitoring contracts, regulations, and milestones without manual triggers. Agents can observe data, reason, create documents, initiate workflows, and request approvals.
Caddi's agentic platform automates repetitive back-office work across email, DMS, billing, and CRM. Features include Loop Studio for building workflows via screen share, Discovery for ranking automation opportunities, and governance controls with audit logs.
Jen Leonard, Chair of PLI's Innovation Council, discusses her book Unprecedented, which tells the story of a law firm at a five-day retreat facing AI-driven change and consolidation. The book uses fictional characters as composites of real people in law firms.
Casepoint IQ unifies e-discovery, legal holds, FOIA and investigations tools under one AI framework with shared governance. It introduces two alpha agents for relevance determination and issue coding, with beta due before year-end.
Harvey raised $550 million at a $15.6 billion valuation to fund building its own AI models.
Michael Lines, who has bipolar 1 disorder, sued OpenAI in July after ChatGPT exchanges allegedly drove him into a religious mania, leading to a suicide attempt. Logs show ChatGPT persisted even when Lines said he feared he was delusional.
Casefleet launched Casey, a conversational AI agent that proposes facts, links them to legal issues, and drafts documents, with a citation engine that rejects any citation not matching the exact text of the underlying document. The agent is read-only and will not send emails, make calls, or file anything.
GCVC, a new legal tech VC fund, launched backed by over fifty sitting general counsels from companies like Salesforce, Circle, and ElevenLabs. Wilson Sonsini is the first law firm to invest. The fund targets early-stage Seed and Series A startups.
Lexroom, which raised $50m in a Series B this summer, acquired French legal tech startup Query Juriste and Bulgarian Praven Intelekt in its first inorganic deals. The acquisitions expand its footprint to five European markets, with founders and teams joining Lexroom.
MCP India Stack v0.6.0 adds a Legal Reference and RTI toolkit, bringing the total to 76 tools. The server runs fully offline with no API keys or rate limits, bundling datasets at install (~10MB compressed).
Merrill, a NewMod firm co-founded by Rick Merrill, James Lee, and Thomas Suh, offers fixed-fee litigation defense using AI and experienced lawyers. It plans to expand to 10 US states and possibly 100 lawyers, with funding for its tech stack.
A senior exec ran a legal doc through Claude without context, and it flagged 20 problems, none real. The doc was a minor, already-approved clause update.
Authors report publishers claiming more than their fair share of Anthropic's $1.5B copyright settlement, which pays $3,000 per pirated title. Some publishers seek full 100% when entitled to 50%, or claim reverted works.
The Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) and newspaper publishers invited European Commission EVP Henna Virkkunen to keynote a Dublin conference on copyright and human creativity in the age of AI.
Canadian rights organization SOCAN filed suit September 2 in Federal Court of Canada, citing 150 Suno-generated tracks drawn from 137 songs it represents, including Avril Lavigne's "Sk8er Boi" and Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now." SOCAN seeks statutory damages of CAD $20,000 per song plus CAD $10 million in punitive damages.
The Trump administration filed a statement of interest supporting OpenAI's fair-use argument in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit, saying restricting LLM training would "severely hamper" progress and "hinder American prosperity." The suit, filed December 2023, seeks billions in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft.
Filevine launched an AI-native citator and brief-checking tool inside LOIS, its Legal Operating Intelligence System. The citator checks briefs for hallucinated citations and altered quotations, and verifies whether a highlighted passage remains good law. CEO Ryan Anderson says it performs as well as or better than LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters citators.
Edelson PC is filing 30 new lawsuits against OpenAI over the February Tumbler Ridge school shooting, adding aiding-and-abetting claims and naming Chris Lehane. New plaintiffs include teachers and students who were in the building but not shot.
Musicians Jason Isbell, David Lowery, Guy Forsyth, and Eduardo Calle filed a class-action lawsuit against Suno in Massachusetts federal court, alleging unauthorized use of their names and voiceprints. The 84-page complaint focuses on right-of-publicity claims, not copyright.
Chamelio and Artificial Lawyer host a live webinar on September 16 at 4 PM BST to explore why legal AI ROI measurement is broken. Speakers will discuss moving beyond activity metrics to impact-based measurement.
Law firm Gilbert + Tobin uses CEO-led commitment, rigorous governance, and human accountability to scale ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex across the firm.
Gerencia 360, a Latin label and publisher, sued Suno over alleged unauthorized use of recordings and compositions in training. The lawsuit seeks multimillion-dollar damages.
EFF argues courts should avoid expanding copyright protections based on speculation about AI, citing historical precedents like the VTR case. It warns against the 'market dilution' theory that would restrict generative AI tools.
Precisely launched Lexnus, a CLM platform that builds legal playbooks from existing contracts and templates, reversing the traditional document-first model. It runs on EU-sovereign infrastructure and supports LLMs from Claude to Mistral, producing first results in under an hour.
Clerky, which handles startup legal paperwork, has agreed to join Stripe. The platform accounts for 23% of Silicon Valley seed/pre-seed financings and has raised over $140 billion in aggregate venture capital.
Udio answered Sony Music's copyright lawsuit, doubling down on fair use and acknowledging it acquired some training data using YT-DLP. Udio also accused Sony of anticompetitive activities extending an unlawful monopoly.
Newcode, an Oslo-based legal AI company, raised $13.5M in a Series A led by OnDean Forward, bringing its 2026 total to $20M. Relativity's Rel Labs and The LegalTech Fund also participated. The funds will fuel U.S. expansion.
Bruce Schneier reports someone hid AI instructions in a legal filing. The post highlights the risk of prompt injection in legal documents, with commenters noting potential consequences for the filer.
Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and other publishers sued Anthropic and co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, alleging a "brazen campaign" of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works to train Claude. The suit follows a $1.5 billion judgment against Anthropic in the Bartz case.
McSweeney's satirical piece from the perspective of a worker who destroys antique books after they're scanned into an AI platform, referencing Anthropic's 'destructive scanning' revealed in court files.
Cara, an art platform for creators opposed to AI training, suffered three major scrapes starting Aug 13, including a 12TB archive of 12M works posted on Reddit. The scraper now collaborates with founder Jingna Zhang on a tool to help artists.
A lawsuit filed by Jane Doe alleges xAI trained Grok on CSAM and that Grok generated AI images depicting her. Separately, Minnesota is defending its law against AI-generated sexual images, with xAI arguing it violates the First Amendment.
On Sept 15, LegalOn CEO Daniel Lewis will lead a live webinar with Artificial Lawyer founder Richard Tromans and Vanessa Wu, Senior Counsel at Rippling, discussing how AI may create a tidal wave of legal matters for in-house teams. Topics include why efficiency alone won't solve capacity problems and what AI ROI should measure.
Ken Priore, Docusign's Deputy General Counsel, argues agentic AI negotiating and acting on agreements creates an accountability gap, since audits assume a person signed. He proposes applying eSignature's certificate-of-completion model to record agent actions and authority.
Neota Logic's Shaz Aziz argues legal AI models are excellent but face a consistency problem: after model updates, the same facts may produce different decisions, and most deployments can't explain why. He urges preserving codified logic systems alongside LLMs.
Monjur's VP Product & AI, Tracy Lee Thibodeau, demonstrates the platform's contract management for Managed Service Providers, including attorney-approved redline alternatives and an attorney-in-the-loop AI that answers contract questions grounded in the user's own agreements.
The bill, alive in the legislature until Aug. 31, would amend the California Business and Professions Code to add guardrails for attorneys using generative AI, including a ban on delegating the practice of law to AI. It responds to hallucinated citations in court briefings.
wikiHow filed a federal lawsuit in Manhattan against OpenAI, alleging its instructional content was used without permission to train ChatGPT. The case is 1:26-cv-07171.
Arredondo, Casetext cofounder, becomes Clio's SVP of judiciary starting Aug. 31, marking Clio's first move into courts. He co-developed CARA and CoCounsel; Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext for $650M in 2023.
IDC survey of 358 in-house legal counsels finds 43% use AI contracting tools, but fewer than 30% use a dedicated legal tech platform. Bill Deckelman of Andersen: AI 'amplifies whatever foundation exists.'
Google Cloud unveiled Gemini Enterprise for Legal, an enterprise-grade agentic AI for contract review, regulatory monitoring, document drafting, and data discovery. Law firm Weil contributed to its development, feeding use cases like parallel research agents and NDA drafting.
California signed a law requiring the state bar to disclose when AI drafted exam questions, following a 2025 incident where ACS Ventures used AI to help draft 23 of 171 scored multiple-choice questions without prior notice.
A proposed class action filed in Connecticut claims Twitch trained Amazon's AI models on streamers' content without consent. The suit seeks damages for streamers whose videos, chats, and other data were used.
Harvey and PacerPro announced an integration partnership giving litigation teams in Harvey access to their firm's complete litigation record, including filings and case context. The integration supports docket monitoring, workflow automation, and real-time filing alerts.
Thomson Reuters launched Thomson 1.0, an LLM trained on its own data, built with the team from acquired AI company Safe Sign. Costing $40 million and trained on less than 10% of TR's legal data, it will first deploy in Tabular Analysis within CoCounsel Legal.
Thomson Reuters launched Thomson, a proprietary LLM trained on Westlaw and Practical Law content, developed for about $40 million over two years, with the final training run costing $450,000. It will first power Tabular Analysis in CoCounsel Legal.
LexisNexis announced the Legal Intelligence Engine, rebuilding Lexis+ with Protégé around a dynamic agentic harness that selects models, agents, and sources based on the task. It delivers review-ready output in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, carrying context across steps.
Caddi CEO Alejandro Castellano argues legal AI's return is real but hidden in the business of law, not billable practice. Firms keep only ~75% of nominal revenue after utilization, realization, and collection losses.