Law And Technology

Colorado has repealed its landmark 2024 artificial intelligence law and replaced it with a narrower statute. Governor Jared Polis signed SB 189 on May 14, 2026, narrowing the state's regulatory focus from broad "high-risk AI" systems to automated decision-making technology used in consequential decisions affecting consumers. The new law delays the effective date to January 1, 2027.

Kirkland & Ellis is investing $500 million to build its own proprietary AI platform for lawyers, marking one of the largest disclosed technology bets by a major law firm. The platform will allow attorneys to access the firm's collective knowledge and deploy custom AI tools across legal work, reducing reliance on off-the-shelf software. Chair Jon Ballis is leading the initiative, which drew input from 250 lawyers including 100 partners. Outside technology vendors are assisting with development but cannot resell the resulting system; Kirkland intends to own or control the technology outright.

Jorge R. Gutierrez, the filmmaker behind The Book of Life, is facing industry backlash after Amazon MGM Studios announced his new animated series Punky Duck would be produced through Project Nara, the studio's AI-driven production pipeline. Amazon green-lit Punky Duck as one of three series funded through its GenAI Creators' Fund, alongside Love, Diana Music Hunters and Cupcake & Friends. Albert Cheng, Amazon MGM's AI chief, is overseeing the initiative.

xAI filed suit on April 9, 2026, in U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado to block enforcement of Colorado's SB24-205, a comprehensive AI anti-discrimination law scheduled to take effect June 30, 2026. The statute requires developers and deployers of high-risk AI systems—those used in hiring, lending, and admissions decisions—to conduct impact assessments, make disclosures, and implement risk mitigation measures to prevent algorithmic discrimination. Two weeks later, on April 24, the U.S. Department of Justice intervened with its own complaint, arguing the law violates the Equal Protection Clause by compelling demographic adjustments through disparate-impact liability while simultaneously authorizing discrimination through exemptions for diversity initiatives. The court granted DOJ's intervention and issued a stay suspending enforcement pending resolution.

Attorneys face mounting professional responsibility exposure as courts increasingly hold lawyers accountable for hallucinated citations and fabricated case law generated by legal AI tools. Recent cases show judges treating AI-produced errors not as technical glitches but as malpractice and sanctions violations, with some decisions naming specific vendors—Lexis+ AI, Ask Practical Law AI, and Westlaw's AI-Assisted Research—as sources of the defective work product.

A federal class action filed in the Northern District of California alleges that Mixpanel used OpenAI-developed AI technology to collect user data, and that a third-party cyberattack subsequently exposed OpenAI account holders' information stored on Mixpanel's platform. The suit, Woodard v. OpenAI, Inc. & Mixpanel, Inc. (3:25-cv-10301), names both companies and asserts claims for negligence, breach of implied contract, and unjust enrichment on behalf of consumers and businesses alike.

Elite law firms are racing to embed generative AI into core legal work—drafting, due diligence, knowledge management, and workflow automation—as adoption has shifted from experimental pilot to competitive necessity. Major BigLaw players are announcing partnerships with AI vendors like Harvey and Legora, deploying Microsoft Copilot, and building proprietary internal tools. The competition is now explicit: firms positioning themselves as technologically current while others scramble to avoid appearing obsolete to clients and recruits.

A Massachusetts judge has barred T. Michael Morgan of Morgan & Morgan from appearing in a lawsuit against Harvard University and Harvard Medical School over the alleged theft of donated body parts. Suffolk Superior Court Justice Kenneth W. Salinger ruled that Morgan failed to demonstrate he had learned from a prior misconduct incident and therefore could not join other firm lawyers already admitted to practice in the case.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed Senate Bill 26-189 on May 14, 2026, repealing and replacing the state's 2024 Artificial Intelligence Act before it took effect. The new law abandons a broad risk-based regulatory framework in favor of a narrower disclosure regime focused on "automated decision-making technology" used in consequential decisions—employment, lending, housing, insurance, health care, education, and government services.

A federal judge in the Southern District of New York has ruled that a criminal defendant's conversations with a publicly available generative AI platform fall outside attorney-client privilege and the work-product doctrine, potentially exposing them to prosecution. In United States v. Bradley Heppner, Judge Jed S. Rakoff held that exchanges with consumer AI tools like Claude are not protected communications simply because they are later shared with counsel. The court reasoned that communications with public, non-enterprise AI systems lack the confidentiality required for privilege protection and do not become privileged retroactively through disclosure to an attorney.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed SB 26-189 on May 14, 2026, replacing the state's 2024 AI law with a narrower framework. The new statute centers on transparency, notice, human review, and data correction for automated decision-making in consequential decisions, including employment. The effective date moves to January 1, 2027. The rewrite abandons the original law's broad risk-management, impact-assessment, and bias-audit requirements in favor of a disclosure-focused approach.

K&L Gates published guidance on May 20, 2026, advising organizations to treat generative AI materials as discoverable evidence subject to standard preservation obligations. The firm's "Litigation Minute," authored by Julie Anne Halter and Christopher J. Valente, identifies prompts, outputs, chat histories, logs, and metadata from GenAI tools as potentially relevant ESI that must be preserved once litigation is reasonably anticipated. The advisory targets corporate legal and IT teams navigating the gap between rapid AI adoption in business workflows and existing discovery frameworks designed before these tools became commonplace.

Two of Florida's largest trial courts have imposed mandatory disclosure requirements for generative AI use in court filings. The Eleventh Judicial Circuit in Miami-Dade County and the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit in Broward County issued administrative orders requiring attorneys and self-represented litigants to disclose when AI assisted in preparing documents and to certify independent verification of all factual assertions, legal citations, and other AI-generated content. Chief Judge Ariana Fajardo Orshan issued the Miami-Dade order on January 15, 2026, with Broward following later that month. Violations carry sanctions including striking filings, monetary penalties, contempt findings, and bar referrals.

A federal court rejected Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman, and co-founder Greg Brockman on statute of limitations grounds, dismissing claims that the company abandoned its nonprofit mission in favor of a for-profit model backed by Microsoft. The ruling eliminates Musk's bid for damages and any court-ordered structural changes to the organization.

SpaceX filed a confidential draft registration statement on April 1, 2026, for what would be a highly unusual public offering. The proposed structure grants Elon Musk, who serves as CEO, CTO, and chair, approximately 85.1% of voting power through super-voting Class B stock, while public investors would receive Class A shares with substantially diminished voting rights. The draft registration also incorporates Texas corporate law, controlled-company exemptions, and mandatory arbitration provisions that would bar shareholders from pursuing class-action lawsuits or jury trials in disputes with the company.

The European Parliament, Council, and European Commission reached a provisional trilogue agreement on May 13, 2026, amending the EU AI Act and postponing key compliance deadlines for high-risk AI systems. COREPER, the Council's Committee of Permanent Representatives, approved the deal. Formal adoption by both Parliament and Council remains pending.

Sam Altman walked back his earlier warnings about artificial intelligence causing mass job displacement, telling investors his near-term labor predictions were "pretty wrong." The OpenAI CEO's recalibration comes as political and market headwinds are mounting against the AI boom. Pennsylvania lawmakers introduced bills to repeal tax incentives for AI data centers and impose an 18-month moratorium on new facilities, while a Gallup poll found 67 percent of adults oppose AI data centers in their communities.

Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont is expected to sign Senate Bill 5, the Connecticut Artificial Intelligence Responsibility and Transparency Act, a sweeping employment law that restricts how companies can deploy automated decision-making in hiring, promotion, discipline, and termination. The bill passed the House 131-17 and the Senate 32-4 on bipartisan votes. The law's employment provisions create two compliance windows: beginning October 1, 2026, employers can no longer use automated tools as a defense against discrimination claims, and WARN Act notices must disclose whether layoffs involve AI or technological change. Starting October 1, 2027, employers using AI that interacts with applicants or employees must provide plain-language disclosure that the person is communicating with an automated system, along with pre-decision notices describing the tool, underlying data, and employer contact information.

Kirkland & Ellis is committing approximately $500 million over the next three to four years to develop its own proprietary artificial intelligence platform, according to reporting on the firm's internal strategy. The world's largest law firm by revenue is moving away from reliance on third-party legal-technology vendors to build in-house AI capacity for research, litigation support, document review, and case-law analysis.

Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Jacobson has launched FundAssist, an internally developed AI platform designed to assist private funds lawyers with document search and drafting in fund formation and ongoing operations. Becky Zelenka, co-head of the firm's private funds group, told Bloomberg Law that the tool will enable the firm to "do more deals" and accelerate junior lawyer development rather than reduce headcount.

On May 14, 2026, the USPTO Director issued a precedential decision denying institution of an inter partes review petition in Magnolia Medical Technologies, Inc. v. Kurin, Inc., involving U.S. Patent No. 12,138,052 B1. The ruling reframed the statutory purpose of AIA reviews: they exist as an alternative to district-court litigation, not as a second forum after a party has already litigated and lost. Magnolia had challenged the patent's validity in district court, failed, and then filed an IPR petition at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. The Director rejected the petition, holding that the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act created IPR and post-grant review to provide a streamlined administrative path to validity testing—not to relitigate issues already decided by courts.

The Ninth Circuit has partially vacated a preliminary injunction blocking California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, allowing some provisions to take effect while keeping others blocked. The panel found that a district court had gone too far in enjoining the statute wholesale, but upheld the injunction for data-use and dark-patterns restrictions. The court determined that key statutory terms—"materially detrimental," "best interests," and "well-being"—are unconstitutionally vague.

Pope Leo XIV released his first major encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on May 15, 2026, arguing that artificial intelligence must be governed by human dignity, conscience, and the common good rather than profit or military efficiency. The document rejects the premise that AI is morally neutral and specifically warns against lethal autonomous weapons, mass surveillance, labor displacement, and the concentration of power within technocratic systems. While framed as formal Catholic teaching, the encyclical addresses multiple audiences: AI developers, governments, military planners, employers, and institutions deploying algorithmic systems in credit decisions, hiring, service delivery, and warfare. Media coverage has interpreted the message as directed at Silicon Valley firms including Meta, Google, and Amazon, though the text's scope extends beyond any single company.

Will Chen, a former Latham & Watkins associate, has released MikeOSS, a free open-source legal AI platform designed to compete with proprietary tools like Harvey and Legora. The platform enables lawyers to draft, edit, review, and search documents through features including a projects vault, tabular review, and customizable workflows. Users supply their own Claude or Gemini API keys to run the system, which Chen has published on GitHub under an open-source license, allowing firms and developers to self-host and modify the software rather than rely on a vendor's closed infrastructure.

A Florida appellate court sanctioned a pro se litigant this week for submitting AI-generated filings containing false case citations and misleading legal arguments. The court barred the filer from making future submissions unless they are signed by a licensed Florida attorney in good standing.

President Trump signed an executive order on June 2, 2026, establishing a voluntary framework that permits frontier AI developers to share their most advanced models with the federal government for up to 30 days before public release. Titled "Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security," the order explicitly disclaims any mandatory licensing, preclearance, or permitting regime for AI models.

Alston & Bird's May 2026 Fintech Case Files highlights three concurrent legal developments reshaping payments and fintech regulation: constitutional challenges to Illinois's Interchange Fee Prohibition Act, a Nevada court ruling that crypto contract traders cannot evade gaming regulations, and class actions alleging undisclosed fees across payment platforms.

BakerHostetler's podcast "Guardian at the Gate: AI's Role in Trademark Enforcement" examines how artificial intelligence is reshaping trademark practice across brand monitoring, infringement detection, and enforcement in digital channels including online marketplaces and social media. The discussion centers on AI-powered tools that scan large volumes of online content to identify potentially confusingly similar marks, logos, and unauthorized uses—work that traditionally required manual review. The firm frames the shift as a response to the volume and velocity of digital infringement, where traditional policing methods struggle to keep pace.

A Florida appellate court dismissed a roofing company's contract dispute after the parties agreed to settle, but used the occasion to order the company's attorney to explain apparent AI-generated citations in his brief. The panel found the filing may have contained fabricated or unsupported legal authorities and directed the lawyer to justify the anomalies before deciding whether to impose sanctions.

Anthropic has launched Claude for the Legal Industry, a suite of AI tools designed to automate routine legal work including contract review, NDA triage, compliance checks, and document summarization. The offering integrates into existing lawyer workflows through Word, Outlook, and Anthropic's own platforms, with practice-area plugins available to paid Claude customers and enterprise administrators. Mark Pike, Anthropic's Associate General Counsel, led the product development and has been the public face of the rollout alongside applied AI architect Maggie Russo.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Meta Platforms' jurisdictional appeal in a Vermont lawsuit alleging that Instagram was deliberately designed to addict young users. The decision leaves intact a lower-court ruling that permits the case to proceed. Meta had argued that Vermont courts lacked authority over the dispute, but the justices rejected that argument without comment.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are embedding engineers directly inside customer organizations to bridge the gap between AI model capability and operational reality. OpenAI has announced a dedicated Deployment Company built around forward-deployed engineers (FDEs)—technical staff working on-site to map workflows, integrate data systems, and move AI from proof-of-concept to production. Anthropic is hiring FDEs for its applied AI team, and Google is pursuing the same model. Palantir pioneered this approach in complex enterprise deployments.

Anthropic has asked a California federal judge to rule that its use of copyrighted materials to train Claude qualifies as transformative fair use, comparing the AI's training process to how humans learn by reading and absorbing themes. The filing stands apart from the $1.5 billion class-action settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic, where the claims deadline passed on March 30, 2026, and a fairness hearing is scheduled for May 14, 2026, in San Francisco federal court.

Foley & Lardner LLP has moved Harvey, an AI platform for legal work, from pilot testing into firmwide deployment. The rollout, announced in May 2026, follows a successful trial last year and represents the firm's commitment to an "AI-first" operating model. Foley operates more than 1,100 lawyers across 27 offices globally.

Generative AI is moving from theoretical concern to practical problem for intellectual property practitioners. As AI tools proliferate in legal workflows, lawyers face immediate questions about authorship, ownership, and risk allocation that existing copyright law—which traditionally requires human authorship—does not yet clearly answer. The U.S. Copyright Office and courts are still working through edge cases involving AI-assisted works, leaving practitioners without settled guidance on critical issues: who owns outputs when a human provides prompts and edits, how to allocate ownership in contracts, and how to protect client interests in training-data disputes.

Above the Law published a speculative feature imagining how artificial intelligence will reshape legal work between 2026 and 2050. The piece frames this as a long-range "what if" narrative rather than reporting on a concrete event or announcement. It traces the gradual normalization of AI across the legal sector—beginning with AI as a support tool for drafting, research, summaries, and document review, then evolving into embedded infrastructure across law firms, corporate legal departments, courts, and legal education.

President Trump signed an executive order Tuesday requiring AI companies to provide the federal government early access to their most advanced models for up to 30 days of review and testing before public release. The order frames this requirement as a safety measure, directing agencies to examine the systems for cybersecurity vulnerabilities and threats to national infrastructure. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are the primary targets, with the administration seeking their voluntary participation in the review process.

A Google information security engineer has been charged in federal court with commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering after allegedly using confidential search data to place bets on Polymarket, a prediction market platform, and profit more than $1 million. Michele Spagnuolo, 36, a Italian national employed by Alphabet, allegedly leveraged nonpublic information about Google user search trends to wager on outcomes tied to Google-related popularity rankings. The criminal complaint was unsealed in New York federal court, where Spagnuolo was taken into custody on Wednesday and did not enter a plea at his initial appearance before a magistrate judge.

Breathitt County Schools in Kentucky has settled its lawsuit against major social media platforms for $27 million, resolving claims that Meta, Snap, TikTok, and YouTube designed addictive products that harmed students. Meta is contributing $9 million of the total—the largest individual payment among defendants.

AI-generated hallucinations are creating real liability exposure in legal practice. Large language models routinely produce fabricated or incorrect case citations, statutory references, and legal propositions that read as authoritative but are entirely false. Courts are already responding by scrutinizing filings for citation errors and imposing sanctions when lawyers submit unverified AI-generated work. The issue implicates attorneys, law firms, and the legal research platforms—including Westlaw and LexisNexis—that lawyers rely on to verify citations before filing.

The Supreme Court unanimously held that the Federal Arbitration Act does not strip federal courts of jurisdiction to confirm or vacate arbitration awards, provided an independent basis for federal jurisdiction exists. In Jules v. Andre Balazs Properties, the Court clarified that while the FAA itself does not create jurisdiction over post-arbitration petitions, it does not eliminate jurisdiction once a court otherwise possesses it—particularly when that court previously handled the underlying dispute before the case went to arbitration.

Stilta, a Stockholm-based AI startup, closed a $10.5 million seed round on May 19, 2026, led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Y Combinator and angel investors from Sana, Legora, OpenAI, Lovable, and Listen Labs. The company, founded in 2026 and led by CEO Block alongside cofounders Estreen, Petrus Werner, and Oscar Adamsson, has built software designed to automate research and analysis in patent litigation—including enforcement, defense, and commercialization work. The platform generates litigation-grade reports and claim charts by searching patents, scientific publications, and archived web data while keeping lawyers in control of the process.

Singer Dua Lipa sued Samsung for $15 million on May 8, 2026, in federal court in California, alleging copyright infringement, trademark infringement, right of publicity violations, and false endorsement under state law and the Lanham Act. The dispute centers on a backstage photograph taken at the 2024 Austin City Limits Festival—an image Lipa owns—that Samsung allegedly manipulated and used on television packaging and global marketing materials beginning in early 2025 without permission, payment, or her involvement. Lipa claims the placement implied her endorsement of Samsung products and drove sales.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced on April 9, 2026, that his office is launching an investigation into OpenAI and its ChatGPT models, alleging their role in facilitating a 2025 Florida State University (FSU) shooting, harming minors, enabling criminal activity, and posing national security risks from potential exploitation by adversaries like the Chinese Communist Party.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7] Subpoenas are forthcoming, with probes focusing on ChatGPT's alleged assistance to the FSU gunman—who queried it on the day of the April 17, 2025, attack about public reaction to a shooting and peak times at the FSU student union—plus links to child sex abuse material, grooming, and suicide encouragement.[1][3][5][6][7]