Expert Analysis

• Planning Personal Phone Collections Before Discovery Begins

  

  For counsel planning a personal phone collection as part of the litigation discovery process, it's important to take early steps to ensure that necessary information will be obtained without exposing unrelated information or running into access issues, says Jeremy Horowitz at MARA Forensics.

• How Cos. Can Reassess Ad Tech After Wash. Pixel Use Ruling

  

  The Washington Supreme Court's decision in Baker v. Seattle Children's Hospital, holding that the hospital website's use of Meta Pixel didn't violate the state’s privacy act, may provide a powerful defense against privacy claims, but shouldn’t be read as a blanket approval of advertising technologies, say attorneys at Duane Morris.

• 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.

• FCRA Ruling Previews Future Business Transaction Litigation

  

  The Ninth Circuit's overturning of a class verdict against CenturyLink is a win for businesses facing Fair Credit Reporting Act willfulness claims, but the question of when a consumer initiates a transaction remains unanswered, say attorneys at Thompson Hine.

• 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.

• A Lesson On How Courts Approach Impossible Patent Claims

  

  The Federal Circuit's recent decision in Satius v. Samsung, concluding that a scientifically impossible patent claim lacks enablement, underscores important considerations when drafting patent claims with potentially incompatible alternatives, and highlights an uncommon strategy for attacking patent validity via claim construction, say attorneys 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.

• Patent Suits Highlight Risks Across Data Center Supply Chain

  

  Recent patent disputes involving technologies that support artificial intelligence data centers showcase the growing litigation risks that data center suppliers and operators face, and raise questions about how litigation responsibilities may be allocated between them, say attorneys at Katten.

• Lessons For Cannabis Dispensaries From Web Tracking Suits

  

  The trajectory of health-tracking litigation in Florida and elsewhere suggests that patient privacy claims will not disappear quickly, so dispensaries should audit their sites, tighten consent and align their disclosures with their actual practices, say attorneys at Buchanan Ingersoll.

• A Defense Attorney Playbook For Challenging Flock Evidence

  

  As law enforcement continues to bring charges based on evidence from Flock cameras and other automated license plate readers, defense counsel should consider four key categories for discovery requests and motions to compel such evidence, says Tamar Lerer at the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender.

• Washington Email Law Still Puts Marketers At Litigation Risk

  

  Despite legislative efforts to curtail abusive litigation after the 2025 Brown v. Old Navy decision extending Washington's Commercial Electronic Mail Act to misleading email subject lines, CEMA can still trigger class actions with statutory damages, even for national campaigns run by companies with no physical presence in Washington, say attorneys at Wilson Elser.

• 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.

• 3 Eligibility Rulings Show Risks Of Broad Claim Constructions

  

  Several recent decisions from the Federal Circuit, including its ruling in Berkeley v. W.W. Grainger, highlight the importance of identifying the inventive aspects of a patent early in the case so that patentees do not inadvertently read the inventive features out of their own claims, say attorneys at MoFo.

• 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.

• 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.