Word of the week: Defensibility
In legal tech last week, courts themselves were hit: a cyberattack halted US federal bankruptcy notices nationwide, and drone strikes on Yandex data centers froze Russian courts’ e-filing system.
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Mary Mack, CEO and Chief Legal Technologist, EDRM.
Organized by our Trusted Partner Nextpoint, this webinar features Hugh Berkson of McCarthy, Lebit, Crystal & Liffman Co, LPA; Anand Mathew of Loop Litigation LLC; and Kiersten Frumkin of Nextpoint.
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On the EDRM Blog
- Is There a “Litmus Test” for a Categorical Privilege Log
- Waterloo and Elevate researchers say Redgrave’s aiR study compared two different tasks
- Defendant Claimed Video of Abuse Was a “Deepfake”; Victim Was Asleep and Could Not Attest to Abuse
- The Four Eras of Search: From “Which Keywords?” to “What Happened?”
- Proposed Montana Deepfake Rule
- The Surprising Side of Rogue AI: Rethinking Information → Knowledge → Wisdom, Part Three
- Are an Expert’s A.I. Prompts Discoverable? Maybe.
Upcoming Webinars on the EDRM Global Webinar Channel
- 20 October | 1 PM ET – Comprehensive eDiscovery Case Management
- 28 October | 1 PM ET – The DSAR Horror Story: When Privacy Requests Become eDiscovery Matters
- 3 November | 1 PM ET – Beyond Search: From Keywords to AI-Integrated eDiscovery
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Can’t make it to a live session? Past EDRM webinars are available to watch anytime on the EDRM Global Webinar Channel. Missed a recent one? Catch up on our most recent on-demand webinars:
- The Judicious Judge’s Guide to Generative Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models – Session 1
- [HaystackID® Webcast] Trade Fraud Investigation Best Practices
- [HaystackID® Webcast] Getting AI Right in eDiscovery: Quality, Validation, and Results
Updates from Around the Globe
- Global Legal Tech Developments: A cyberattack on contractor BAE Systems took down the Bankruptcy Noticing Center, halting notices for federal bankruptcy courts nationwide (U.S. Courts statement). Yandex Cloud outages froze Russian arbitration courts’ “Electronic Justice” system, with at least nine regions reporting outages, after reported Ukrainian drone strikes shut down one Yandex data center and knocked part of a second out of service. Microsoft launched Copilot for Legal, with more than 20 legal skills and partner plugins being developed with Harvey, Legora, Relativity, Everlaw, iManage, NetDocuments and Docusign. OpenAI disclosed that an internal model forged authentication tokens on a government statistics site and, in a separate incident, another model used test cryptocurrency from a wallet it didn’t control to complete a task. Booz Allen’s lab found AI agents moved inside an industrial control network about 16 minutes after a perimeter compromise. Anthropic warned small models could soon self-replicate across poorly secured devices. The FTC subpoenaed OpenAI and Anthropic for documents on security incidents, safeguards, marketing and privacy. Separately, the White House mandated that AI companies report and remediate security incidents. The Financial Times reported Freshfields partners estimated legal tech company valuations at 25–40 times revenue as they weighed a spin-out of Freshfields Lab. The Third Circuit unsealed its opinion holding 2,243 Westlaw headnotes copyrightable and ROSS’s AI training on them not fair use (opinion), HT Bob Ambrogi. The US DOJ gave the ABA’s accreditation council 15 days to loosen its full-time faculty rule or explain why it doesn’t violate antitrust law, per Above the Law.
- International eDiscovery Trends: In Apple’s trade secret suit against OpenAI and two former Apple employees, Judge Edward Davila granted expedited discovery but less broadly than plaintiff Apple requested (order). The forensics now cut both ways in this dispute: OpenAI says an employee who returned to Apple sent over a hundred confidential device files to personal accounts on his last day, which Apple disputes. In August, Apple described forensic findings from Liu’s MacBook, uncovered because a Mac mini he used synced via iCloud, and alleged he told an OpenAI colleague to destroy evidence. Cormack, Grossman and Pickens reanalyzed Redgrave’s study of Relativity aiR and found aiR “comparable to, but not superior to” Relativity Active Learning on comparable review tasks; Doug Austin compared the recall numbers. J.S. Held’s Q3 AI Disputes Monitor added 42 matters, for 468 matters tracked, and identifies model versions, prompts, outputs, and system logs as potential evidence. Northeastern researchers found 19 of 21 late-model cars in their study sent data to at least one third party, and 28 of 30 automaker apps contacted ad or analytics companies: another potential source of ESI. Control Risks plans to spin off its discovery, data and forensics businesses into a Beringer Capital-backed company led by former CloudNine CEO Georges Sabongui. Lineal acquired Forentec, an eDiscovery, forensics, cyber and OSINT firm near Zurich. Proofpoint agreed to buy Varonis for about $6.3 billion in cash.
- From our Trusted Partners: HaystackID on validating AI in eDiscovery and DOJ’s Fraud Division listing tariff evasion among its corporate priorities; Relativity on moving fast on AI without sacrificing rigor; ComplexDiscovery previewed the Tallinn Digital Summit and Estonia’s planned pilot of digital identities for AI agents; Magnet Forensics on the five phases of a ransomware investigation; and Redgrave’s Erica Zolner, who moderated a panel on privilege and work product in the GenAI workflow at the EDI Leadership Summit.
- World Events Impacting Legal Tech: The Mideast conflicts continued. Ebola cases rose to eight in Kenya, while the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo spread to an eighth province. Protests and violent clashes were reported in France, Italy, and Albania; Newsweek mapped the situation. The UK Legal Aid Agency breach is worse than thought: stolen data includes about 250,000 pre-2007 records and the names of judges and lawyers in Crown Court trials. In Brazil, the electoral court voted 5-2 to adopt a definition of AI deepfakes in political ads, and a judge preliminarily ordered the removal of an unlabeled pro-Lula AI video within 24 hours ahead of the Oct. 25 runoff. Polish prosecutors say spyware maker NSO had technical access to data Pegasus harvested under the former government. Hackers apparently raised the temperature of refrigeration units in hundreds of French supermarkets, causing fires and spoiled food. Italy temporarily cut air-traffic handling capacity by 50% after a data-network failure; the air navigation company ruled out a cyberattack. Stanford researchers found a way to accelerate recovery in bleached corals under laboratory conditions.
Catch our latest syndicated EDRM Global Podcast Network episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more.
Illumination Zone Podcasts
Recent guests include:
- Episode 243 | Robb Caruso, Vice President of Legal and Cyber Solutions, HaystackID
- Episode 242 | Esther Birnbaum, Executive Vice President of Data Intelligence, HaystackID
- Episode 241 | Gabe Landau, Senior Vice President of eDiscovery and Incident Response Solutions, HaystackID
EDRM Announcements
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P.S. This update was assisted by GAI and LLM Technologies as per EDRM’s GAI and LLM Policy
