Google Beats Online Publishers' AI Overviews Antitrust Suit

By Craig Clough

A D.C. federal judge on Wednesday dismissed antitrust suits from Chegg Inc. and Penske Media Corp. against Google, finding that their central claims that the search engine giant coerces publishers into supplying free content for its artificial intelligence products "fail to get out of the starting gate." 

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Trump Says Copyright Chief Can't Stay In Office Amid Appeal

By Adam Lidgett

The Trump administration is urging the D.C. Circuit to let it remove U.S. Copyright Office leader Shira Perlmutter, arguing that the U.S. Supreme Court's decision protecting Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook for now does not entitle Perlmutter to remain in office while her firing challenge proceeds.

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Judge Should Penalize Meta $40B In Latest Trial, NM Argues

By Cara Salvatore

The state of New Mexico asked a judge Thursday to penalize Meta $35 billion to $40 billion for statements that a jury found grossly misrepresented the social media giant's actual data privacy practices, while Meta argued no harm was proven and the damages should be in the $345 million to $3.45 billion range.

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Apple Says YouTube's Bad Protections Doom AI Scraping Suit

By Bonnie Eslinger

Apple urged a California federal judge Thursday to toss a proposed class action brought by YouTube creators alleging it violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions by scraping copyrighted videos to train its AI tools, arguing there was no circumvention and any access controls fell outside the DMCA because they were "ineffective."

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Pentagon Calls Stars And Stripes Its Own Government Speech

By Jared Foretek

Military newspaper Stars and Stripes qualifies as government speech and can therefore be controlled without violating the First Amendment, according to the new brief from the U.S. Department of Defense and top Pentagon brass in their bid for a summary judgment win over members of the paper's board.

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Bill Withers' Estate Sues Capitol, UMG Over Olivia Dean Song

By Gina Kim

Capitol Records, Universal Music Group, Sony and others were sued Thursday in California federal court by the late R&B and soul singer Bill Withers' music publisher, which accused them of infringing the melody of his song "Just the Two of Us" for Olivia Dean's song "I've Seen It."

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Brief

Customers Ask 9th Circ. To Halt Paramount-Warner Bros. Deal

By Nadia Dreid

Streaming service customers are asking the Ninth Circuit to step in and stop Paramount Skydance's planned $110 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery until a court can decide if their antitrust suit challenging the merger will be dismissed.

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Bipartisan Legislation Floated To Fight Foreign-Website Piracy

By Elliot Weld

The two chambers of Congress have introduced related legislation that would allow U.S. courts to direct internet service providers to block foreign criminal and piracy sites within the U.S.

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Judge Tosses Infringement Claims Against Baseball Critic

By Tom Lotshaw

A New York federal judge dismissed some trademark and copyright infringement claims that Cooperstown Dreams Park had lodged against a YouTuber who mocked its youth baseball facility as a place where youngsters' big league ambitions "go to die."

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Mich. Court Tosses Copyright Suit Against NBA's Pelicans

By Ganesh Setty

An artist who has accused the NBA's New Orleans Pelicans of copyright infringement for imitating his works' "signature style" in social media posts failed to establish how the team's conduct was connected to Michigan, a Michigan federal court ruled, granting dismissal. 

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Calif. Gov. Pushes For More In Signing Bill Limiting CIPA Suits

By Allison Grande

California's governor approved legislation Wednesday to block private litigants from bringing lawsuits under one provision of the California Invasion of Privacy Act, while urging the Legislature to keep working on efforts to expand this ban to include additional website tracking claims under the decades-old wiretap statute.  

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MLB Can't Bat Ticket Theft Suit To Arbitration, Judge Says

By Bonnie Eslinger

A New York federal judge denied a Major League Baseball unit's bid to compel arbitration in a proposed class action over digital security breaches that allegedly led to the disappearance of game tickets from the MLB app, finding it failed to show plaintiffs agreed to terms containing the arbitration clause.

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Monthly Merger Review Snapshot

By Matthew Perlman

State enforcers settled their case challenging Paramount Skydance's planned $110 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, while the U.S. Department of Justice probes Fox's planned $22 billion deal for Roku and regulators review massive deals in the energy and railroad sectors.

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Google Ad Tech MDL Teed Up For Trial Largely Intact

By Bryan Koenig

Gannett, the Daily Mail and a certified class of website publishers scored a major win with a New York federal court ruling largely refusing to let Google scrap antitrust allegations targeting its advertising placement technology business in sprawling multidistrict litigation.

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Google Shakes Suit Over Search Engine Default Agreements

By Bonnie Eslinger

A proposed consumer class action accusing Google of monopolizing the online search market has been tossed by a California federal judge who said the plaintiffs didn't provide evidence showing that "better" options could have been available if Google hadn't struck default search engine deals with Apple and other companies.

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SEC Fines Ex-NFL Player, Influencers Over 'White-Label' Firms

By Sarah Jarvis

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has levied industry bars and a total of nearly $600,000 in fines on seven people, including a former professional football player, for allegedly acting as unregistered brokers by operating and marketing white-label platforms purchased from a third party for trading in so-called contracts for differences.

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Uranium Finance Jury Sees 'I Did A Crypto Heist' Chat

By Stewart Bishop

A federal jury in Manhattan was shown chat threads Thursday that purport to show a cybersecurity consultant saying "I did a crypto heist," in a computer fraud and money laundering trial over what prosecutors say was a short-lived hacking campaign that drained $53 million from crypto exchange Uranium Finance.

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FCC Officially Ditches Race, Ethnicity, Gender Reporting Reqs

By Nadia Dreid

The Federal Communications Commission has officially done away with a rule that required TV and radio broadcasters to disclose data about their employment diversity to the agency after the Fifth Circuit struck the rule down last year.

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7th Circ. Asks When Int'l Arbitration Pacts Are 'Null And Void'

By Celeste Bott

The Seventh Circuit for the first time is grappling with the grounds under which courts may determine if an international arbitration clause is null and void, with one judge questioning Thursday whether consumers should be forced to arbitrate their claims against online casino operators in Canada if Ontario law could ultimately invalidate any resulting award.

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Kirkland Tapped To Replace HSF Kramer In Power Plant Ch. 11

By Clara Geoghegan

West Virginia coal plant Omnis Pleasants LLC has hired Kirkland & Ellis LLP in its contentious Delaware Chapter 11 after Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer LLP's previous work for key creditors disqualified it as debtors counsel.

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NY Art Ruling Creates Fault Line In Cultural Property Cases

A recent New York state appellate decision, blocking a Holocaust victim’s heirs from using a criminal turnover order to reclaim a work the Art Institute of Chicago says it acquired legally, makes establishing ownership a newly central question in cultural property disputes, says Duncan Levin at Levin & Associates.

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Testing AI's Promise For Large-Scale Document Review

Our document-review comparison of attorneys' responsiveness and issue coding decisions versus predictions generated by artificial intelligence across 1,600 documents suggests that these tools can offer a reasonable and reliable basis for improved discovery workflows, provided lawyers understand where guardrails are needed, say attorneys at Redgrave.

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Justice Alito Says He's Weighing The Best Time To Retire

By Katie Buehler

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has confirmed that he considered retiring at the end of the high court's latest term, and that he will continue to weigh that decision "every term." 

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Munger Tolles Announces Clerkship Bonus Increases

By Matt Perez

Munger Tolles & Olson LLP announced Thursday that it is increasing its clerkship bonuses to $180,000 for one qualifying clerkship and $200,000 for two or more qualifying clerkships.

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Roberts Wants Less Talk. Supreme Court Attorneys Disagree.

By Katie Buehler

Near the end of last term, Chief Justice John Roberts voiced his frustration with the U.S. Supreme Court's lengthening oral argument sessions and suggested the justices might tweak their format over the summer. But as the new term begins Monday, the court has yet to announce any changes, and advocates see little need for improvement.

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5 Supreme Court Cases To Watch This Fall

By Katie Buehler

The U.S. Supreme Court will convene Monday to begin its 2026 October term, which includes several cases that could determine the future of climate change tort litigation, expand religious freedoms and parental rights, and grant states authority to require proof of citizenship when individuals register for presidential elections using state forms. 

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Analysis

DOJ Envisions 'Full-Fledged Law Firm' To Combat Gov't Fraud

By Phillip Bantz

The National Fraud Enforcement Division was created less than six months ago, but it is rapidly reshaping the U.S. Department of Justice and spurring an uptick in internal corporate investigations, white collar experts say.

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Legal Sector Adds 2K Jobs, For 6th Straight Month Of Growth

By Tracey Read

While the overall U.S. economy's unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2% last month, the legal industry was in the midst of a six-month hot streak.

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Judge Clevenger Retires After 36 Years On Fed. Circ.

By Dani Kass

U.S. Circuit Judge Raymond C. Clevenger III has retired from the Federal Circuit, 20 years after taking senior status, the court said Friday.

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Jackson Walker May Face New Sanctions Over Old Romance

By Rick Archer

A Texas bankruptcy judge Friday threatened Jackson Walker LLP with sanctions over yet another bankruptcy case where the firm's retention was approved by a judge in a relationship with a former attorney at the firm.

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Keesal Young Owes Duty To Safeguard 316K People's Data

By Matt Perez

A California federal judge has kept negligence and consumer privacy claims intact against law firm Keesal Young & Logan over a 2024 data breach that exposed the personal information of more than 316,000 people, finding the plaintiffs have standing because their data apparently landed on the dark web.

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Trump Asks 9th Circ. To Pause Seattle US Atty Reinstatement

By Rachel Riley

The Trump administration called on the Ninth Circuit Friday to suspend a federal judge's Thursday order reinstating Roger Rogoff as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington, seeking to keep Charles Neil Floyd as acting head of the Seattle office pending the government's appeal.

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Thomson Reuters Hit With Antitrust Case Over 'Killer' AI Deal

By Matthew Perlman

A California law firm has accused Thomson Reuters of violating antitrust law when it purchased artificial intelligence research tool Casetext for $650 million and then shuttered the platform to extinguish a rising competitor to its Westlaw service.

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Amazon Seeks Records Around Lawyer's USPTO Suspension

By Ben Adlin

An attorney Amazon has accused of furthering a scheme to fraudulently register thousands of trademarks and use them to report infringement by rival Amazon merchants must hand over documents related to her discipline in California and Washington, the retail giant argued in a Washington federal court filing Thursday.

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Tenn. High Court Keeps ABA As Law School Accreditor

By Emma Cueto

The Tennessee Supreme Court on Friday declined to follow other conservative states in dropping the American Bar Association as the state's law school accreditor, though it indicated it is open to approving other accreditors in addition to or instead of the ABA in the future.

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Analysis

3rd Circ. AI Ruling May Reach Beyond Westlaw Content Fight

By Ivan Moreno

The Third Circuit went out of its way to say its ruling against a defunct legal research startup was not a generative artificial intelligence case, but copyright lawyers expect the reach of its reasoning to be tested almost immediately in pending AI litigation.

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Roundup

GC Cheat Sheet: The Hottest Corporate News Of The Week

By Michele Gorman

The Department of Justice has unveiled new corporate fraud enforcement priorities, and a report found that more than four out of five legal departments have adopted artificial intelligence. These are among the stories in corporate legal news you may have missed in the past week.

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Law360's Legal Lions Of The Week

By Kevin Penton

Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP leads this week's edition of Law360 Legal Lions after a California federal jury said Apple owes $5.7 billion to headphone-maker Taction for infringing two vibration technology patents, issuing the largest patent verdict in U.S. history.

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In Case You Missed It: Hottest Firms And Stories On Law360

For those who missed out, here's a look back at the law firms, stories and expert analyses that generated the most buzz on Law360 last week.

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