My Old Friend, “Conditional Relevance,” May Not Be Dead, But It Is on Life Support

A proposed amendment to Federal Rule of Evidence 104(b) would eliminate the longstanding concept of “conditional relevance,” replacing it with a uniform approach to relevance while retaining the ability to admit evidence subject to later...

Cite Checking to Find Hallucinated Cases Deemed Insufficient – Part II – Verification and Candor Are Expected

Recent federal decisions emphasize that automated cite checking is not enough when AI touches legal filings. Courts expect attorneys to personally verify authorities, quotations, and cited cases, and to act candidly and promptly when errors...

It May Be an Abuse of Discretion to Grant Summary Judgment for a Defendant Before Deciding a Plaintiff’s Sanctions Motion

Michael D. Berman examines Smith v. Polk Co., where the court addressed two spoliation sanctions motions before granting summary judgment. Applying Shaw v. Foreman, the court recognized that a sanctions motion involving evidence significant to...

Discovery Is Quietly Reorganizing Itself Around AI

A panel of eDiscovery and legal-tech leaders from HaystackID’s most recent webcast reports that AI-assisted review has moved from experimentation to default practice far faster than technology-assisted review did a decade ago, reshaping early case...

An Attorney-Client Communication Advising Spoliation is Not Privileged

Michael D. Berman examines a ruling that advice to spoliate evidence is not privileged, though the court found no actual destruction because both pre- and post-advice versions of Meta’s disputed documents survived and were ordered...

Drafting RFPs for Robots to Read

With producing parties increasingly letting large language models make first-pass relevance calls, this piece argues that requests for production should be drafted as prompts and demonstrates this approach using the Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox...

Restrictions on Use of Artificial Intelligence Tools to Process Disclosure Materials

Glass Houses Proverb—Don’t Throw Stones and Invective

A Court of Federal Claims judge sanctioned plaintiffs’ counsel under RCFC 11 for confidently asserting settled North Carolina law without citing a single supporting case, then calling the government’s correct position “frivolous.” The same opinion...

When Evidence Behaves Like Water, Law Cannot Think Like a Mouse

Ralph Losey argues that quantum and quantum-assisted systems will produce evidence that varies between runs rather than repeating identically. Lawyers will need to test whether the resulting distribution is reliable and preserve the calibration logs,...

Information Governance–Employee’s Use of Employer’s Email for Privileged Communications

Michael Berman analyzed Lalwani v. Trustees of Indiana University where an employee, plaintiff  Mr. Lalwani, had communicated with his lawyers using the employer-defendant university’s email system that found Indiana University to be a public institution...

Passing the Controls: The Art of Legal Judgment, Mentorship, and the Next Generation in the Age of AI

What happens to legal judgment when AI can perform, at surface level, the very tasks junior lawyers have always used to build skill? Retired judge Ralph Artigliere and Wake Forest-bound Zara Russell tackle that question...

Another A.I. Protective Order

Protective orders addressing the use of A.I. to review materials produced to an opponent in discovery are becoming routine.  The stipulated protective order in RMME LLC v. Majestic Steel USA, Inc., 2026 WL 1831063, at...