Expert Analysis

• Opinion

  Judges Must Turn To Merits Earlier To Fix Civil Justice System

  

  The U.S. justice system is long overdue for a cultural shift that encourages judges to engage with the merits of a case from the outset, which would help to cut through procedural complexities and deliver high-quality justice efficiently and at lower cost, says Steven Kayman at Rottenberg Lipman.

• Series

  Open-Water Swimming Makes Me A Better Lawyer

  

  Swimming long distances in open waters is not necessarily an escape from my intellectual property practice, but a complementary discipline that similarly rewards sustained attention, intellectual curiosity, resilience and the ability to pursue a distant objective without losing command of the immediate task, says Christina MacDougall at Morgan Lewis.

• Conflicting Rulings Cloud NCAA Eligibility Rule

  

  The NCAA's adoption of the five-to-five eligibility rule has resulted in a genuinely fractured landscape, with the qualification for members of the class of 2022 essentially dependent upon the location of the athlete and the institution rather than on the underlying facts of the case, says Andrew Hope at Buchanan Ingersoll.

• Opinion

  The Invisible AI Danger That May Undermine Legal Profession

  

  A public database tracking cases involving hallucinations generated by artificial intelligence recently surpassed 2,200 entries, but the bigger risk underlying attorneys’ use of such tools is that they will slowly surrender their judgment to AI and lose analytical skills, says Massachusetts District Court Associate Justice Brian Palmucci.

• What Axing ERISA Exhaustion Rule Means For Plan Sponsors

  

  The Eleventh Circuit’s recent reversal of a 40-year precedent requiring plaintiffs to exhaust administrative remedies before filing statutory Employee Retirement Income Security Act claims eliminates a common threshold defense in fiduciary breach suits, making it important for plan sponsors to reassess their internal review and litigation strategies, say attorneys at Nelson Mullins.

• Courts Signal Higher FCRA Bar For Identity Theft Claims

  

  Recent rulings adopting a heightened, "objectively and readily verifiable" inaccuracy standard may give credit furnishers stronger defenses to identity theft-related Fair Credit Reporting Act claims in the Ninth Circuit, while requiring them to continue documenting thorough dispute investigations, says Brian Kiolbasa at Ballard Spahr.

• FDA Classification Setback Bodes Well For Wound Care Cos.

  

  A Georgia federal court's recent decision in MiMedx v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration constrains the FDA's analytical framework for classifying certain wound care products as biological products, carrying important ramifications for manufacturers seeking to avoid heightened regulatory requirements, say attorneys at Hyman Phelps.

• The Patent Circuit: Minding Patents' Family Histories

  

  The Federal Circuit's recent decision in Epic Tech v. Pen-Tech highlights the relevance of patent families in determining whether to maintain an ongoing patent infringement litigation, and the sanctions risk that may stem from failing to account for patent relatives, say attorneys at Knobbe Martens.

• How AI Could Help Judges Spot Their Own Biases

  

  In close cases where there’s room for discretion, artificial intelligence could challenge judges’ implicit biases by running counterfactual tests at scale — but any judicial use of such tools would need guardrails, say Arnold Peter at Peter Law and Nancy Rapoport at University of Nevada.

• Online Presence Complicates Defamation's Public Figure Test

  

  Recent defamation cases demonstrate that online presence can affect how courts distinguish between public and private figures, so litigants should consider several questions when evaluating potential claims and defenses where public figure status may affect the litigation, such as whether there is a connection between the plaintiff's public activities and the alleged defamation, say attorneys at Brown Rudnick.

• 3 Strategies To Reduce AI Sycophancy In Legal Work

  

  The tendency of generative artificial intelligence models to tell users what they want to hear can reinforce attorneys’ confirmation bias when testing the strength of arguments, and it can’t simply be prompted away — but a few practices can help mitigate it, says Michael Ott at Ice Miller.

• Open Issues After 2nd Circ.'s Airport Phone Search Ruling

  

  While the Second Circuit’s recent U.S. v. Alisigwe decision confirms border agents' broad authority to conduct routine manual cellphone searches at ports of entry, significant questions remain about more wide-ranging forensic searches at the border, say attorneys at Baker Botts.

• 2nd Circ. EFAA Ruling Shifts Employer Litigation Strategy

  

  In Diaz-Roa v. Hermes Law, the Second Circuit recently held that, under the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, employers can't carve out nonharassment claims and send them to arbitration, which has implications for discovery, litigation costs and resolution strategy in EFAA-covered disputes, say attorneys at Krevolin Horst.

• Series

  Being In The Peace Corps Made Me A Better Lawyer

  

  When I served in the Peace Corps, the people of the West African village where I was stationed helped me acclimate to my new surroundings and enabled me to develop problem-solving, teamwork and empathy skills that have bolstered my legal practice far beyond the ability to offer technical advice, says Brian Bewley at McGuireWoods.

• Rebuttal

  North Carolina's Funding Ban Is An Outlier, Not A Model

  

  A recent Law360 guest article argues that North Carolina's litigation funding ban should be adopted by other states, but that analysis overstates what North Carolina did and misjudges how the law will travel, says Dai Wai Chin Feman at the International Legal Finance Association.