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October 09, 2025
MILWAUKEE — Concluding in part that the plaintiff didn’t show that the fiduciary exception to attorney-client privilege applies, a Wisconsin federal judge upheld termination of long-term disability (LTD) benefits in a case that involved disputes regarding the duties of the claimant’s “regular occupation” as a customer service representative who worked remotely.
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October 09, 2025
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 8 requested responses to a petition challenging a South Carolina justice’s appointment of a receiver over the insurance assets of a solvent Canadian company as a sanction for its failure to participate in discovery in an asbestos action.
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October 08, 2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. — A federal judge in California said music publishers’ artificial intelligence copyright claims against Anthropic PBC may proceed just days after the company asked for relief from a magistrate judge’s conclusion that the case’s novelty and complexity permitted delaying the disclosure of potential damages.
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October 08, 2025
OAKLAND, Calif. — Days after granting the plaintiffs’ third motion for class certification in an Employee Retirement Income Security Act suit over alleged underpayment for out-of-network behavioral health treatment, a California federal judge issued a tentative order on Oct. 7 for a law firm representing the plaintiffs to pay $50,000 for disclosures to the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) that she found constituted “a knowing and intentional breach of” a stipulated protective order in the case.
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October 07, 2025
SAN FRANCISCO — A California federal judge granted nonparty John Doe’s motion to quash a subpoena issued to website security company Cloudflare Inc., requiring it to produce information about the operators of a website that purportedly defamed a British citizen, finding that the citizen’s court filings and the motion to quash by Doe, a journalist who wrote for the site and wants to keep his identity secret, “make clear that the subpoena should be quashed.”
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October 07, 2025
CLEVELAND — A pharmacy benefits manager (PBM) in the nationwide opioid multidistrict litigation on Oct. 6 objected to a ruling by the special master overseeing the MDL denying its motion for a protective order regarding a deposition that the PBM says will give counsel for the plaintiffs “two bites at the apple.”
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October 07, 2025
CINCINNATI — The Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals granted FirstEnergy Corp.’s petition for mandamus related to an order to compel investigatory documents from law firms retained by FirstEnergy, which was suspected of wrongdoing in a securities bribery scandal; the panel found that the documents are protected by the attorney-client privilege and the work product doctrine.
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October 07, 2025
PHILADELPHIA — A law firm and its managing partner, who represented plaintiffs who claimed that they suffered birth defects as a result of their mothers being given the drug thalidomide to treat morning sickness during their pregnancies, tell a Pennsylvania federal judge in response to a show cause order that sanctions are not warranted for the firm’s alleged misconduct during the litigation, which began in 2011.
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October 07, 2025
HARRISBURG, Pa. — In an Oct. 6 decision it said involved a matter of first impression, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court disagreed with the reason a state court cited for overruling Pennsylvania Parole Board discovery objections in a parole dispute but upheld the result on the grounds that the board lacks authority “to create an evidentiary privilege.”
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October 07, 2025
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 6 rejected a medical product company’s petition for a writ of certiorari in which it told the court that a North Carolina federal court violated its due process rights by changing both the time to trial and the time for discovery in a patent infringement case for which the Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has already ordered a new trial.
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October 07, 2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Anthropic PBC told a federal judge in California that music publishers already have all the information they need to calculate damages and neither the novelty nor the complexity of an artificial intelligence copyright case requires delaying the disclosure.
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October 07, 2025
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The Alabama Supreme Court granted a petition for writ of mandamus and issued a writ directing a lower court to set aside its order denying a summary judgment motion filed by a defendant in a suit by two men against the defendant and other parties over injuries sustained in an altercation outside a nightclub, finding that the plaintiffs failed to use due diligence in their discovery efforts to learn the identity of the defendant and the claims against him are time-barred pursuant to the relevant statute of limitations.
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October 06, 2025
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A school district’s petition for a writ of certiorari that asking U.S. Supreme Court justices to clear up conflicting court interpretations regarding enforcement of the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA) alongside state public records acts (PRAs) was denied by the high court on Oct. 6.
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October 06, 2025
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Insurance and business interests told the U.S. Supreme Court that jurisdiction ends at a state’s borders and urged the court to reject a South Carolina justice’s appointment of a receiver over the assets of a solvent Canadian company as a discovery sanction in an asbestos case.
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October 06, 2025
EAST ST. LOUIS, Ill. — An Illinois federal judge issued rulings on cross-motions to compel discovery for documents related to litigation in a similar case and insurance filings, among other things in a refinery owner’s case against several oil companies alleging violations of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act over environmental contamination.
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October 03, 2025
OAKLAND, Calif. — A federal magistrate judge in California on Oct. 2 declined to expand the datasets subject to discovery in an artificial intelligence copyright suit, relying on her previous conclusion that discovery should be limited to The Pile dataset, which contains the copyrighted works and was used to train Nvidia Corp.’s NeMo Megatron large language model.
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September 30, 2025
FRANKFORT, Ky. — The prosecution’s failure to disclose during discovery the existence of recordings of incriminating jailhouse phone calls made by the defendant violated state criminal procedures, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled, leading it to reluctantly reverse the man’s murder conviction and remand for a new trial.
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September 30, 2025
WILMINGTON, Del. — A Delaware state vice chancellor granted a stay of discovery pending the resolution of motions to dismiss in three related cases concerning a disputed captive reinsurance pool, holding that the filing defendants demonstrated good cause under the court’s rules and concluding that, with dispositive motions pending and no special circumstances justifying immediate discovery, a pause was necessary to prevent undue burden and expense.
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September 26, 2025
PHILADELPHIA — In a ruling upholding a trial court’s grant of summary judgment that ended a 13-year-old lawsuit over the murder of a confidential informant (CI) in an illegal gambling investigation, a Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel also affirmed the lower court’s denial of discovery motions by the decedent’s estate.
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September 26, 2025
SAN FRANCISCO — A California federal judge on Sept. 25 denied a motion for relief from a magistrate judge’s order limiting discovery into the datasets used to train artificial intelligence, saying courts regularly impose such limits when the discovery exceeds the allegations in a complaint.
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September 26, 2025
SAN FRANCISCO — Responding to a motion by authors arguing that a magistrate judge improperly limited discovery to a single dataset in an artificial intelligence copyright suit, Nvidia Corp. told the court that the order merely limits the plaintiffs to their own allegations and that there was no error sufficient to overturn the nondispositive order.
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September 24, 2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. — A federal magistrate judge in California declined to order music publishers to immediately supplement damages computations under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26 in an artificial intelligence copyright suit, noting the novelty and complexity of the issue.
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September 24, 2025
SAN FRANCISCO — The federal government on Sept. 23 filed a petition for rehearing or rehearing en banc concerning the discovery portion of a split Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals order in which the appellate panel majority, in a ruling addressing two appeals in a case challenging the large scale reduction-in-force (RIF) of federal workers, denied the government’s petition for a writ of mandamus seeking to require the trial court to vacate a discovery order and vacated a preliminary injunction and remanded for further consideration.
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September 24, 2025
PHILADELPHIA — A Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel denied the petition of a reinsurer and three former executives to rehear its decision to vacate a lower court’s discovery and summary judgment rulings in investors’ suit against the reinsurer and executives over allegations that they violated federal securities laws by omitting historical loss ratios from loss reserves disclosures; the panel had found that the omitted historical loss ratios were material and that discovery had not been completed.
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September 23, 2025
NEW YORK — A federal magistrate judge in New York denied a motion to compel by OpenAI entities and Microsoft seeking user logs from The New York Times’ internal ChatGPT-based tool, ruling that the logs are irrelevant to the fair use defense and would cost nearly $1 million and three months to review and produce.