AI × Law

Kirkland & Ellis has committed $500 million to build its own proprietary AI platform spanning litigation, transactions, and investment funds. The law firm has assembled a team of more than 180 engineers and 250 lawyers to develop the technology in-house rather than purchasing third-party tools.

The New Mexico Supreme Court imposed a $5,000 fine on a criminal defense attorney who submitted an appellate brief containing errors generated by generative AI. The fine follows the lawyer's admission that the AI-generated text was used in a murder conviction appeal.

Chilean legal AI startup Magnar secured $8 million in Series A funding. The round included new investment from Argentine law firm Beccar Varela alongside existing investor Carey, a prominent Chilean firm.

Legaltech startup Xapien secured £41.4 million in a growth round led by Spectrum Equity with participation from YFM Equity Partners. The company will use the funds to expand its US presence and scale its AI-native platform that automates third-party due diligence and continuous risk monitoring for legal and compliance teams.

White & Case has made an undisclosed strategic investment in Clauze.AI, a Saudi Arabia-based legal AI platform. Clauze.AI develops artificial intelligence solutions focused on contract review, corporate governance, and due diligence.

China's Supreme People's Court released guidance cases addressing emerging unfair competition issues, including AI-generated fake product reviews and browser extensions that insert AI assistants while stripping revenues from third-party sites. The guidance signals enforcement priorities for Chinese lower courts regarding tech platforms and AI misuse.

A survey of 115 Dutch legal professionals by Legal Benchmarks revealed that 63.5% use AI for legal research daily, with adoption highest among junior lawyers. However, 67.8% reported that the initial AI-generated output is usable only half the time or less, with hallucinated or invented law cited as the least acceptable error.

Boston University law professors Jessica Silbey and Woodrow Hartzog published a paper proposing a functional test to define 'AI slop' based on exertion, imposition on recipients, and domain degradation rather than content quality. The proposal arrives as courts face thousands of cases involving AI hallucinations and new transparency mandates under the EU AI Act and California's SB 942 take effect.

Canadian judicial and administrative bodies—including the Canadian Judicial Council and the Federal Court—have updated guidelines regulating AI use in decision-making. The frameworks strictly prohibit judges and tribunal members from delegating decision-making authority or evidence analysis to AI, while setting standards for transparency, explainability, and human oversight.

Thomson Reuters argued to the Third Circuit that a U.S. Department of Justice statement flagged by defunct legal tech startup Ross Intelligence does not support Ross's fair-use defense. The filing comes in Ross's interlocutory appeal of a summary judgment ruling that it infringed Westlaw headnotes to train its AI platform.

Latham & Watkins has purchased its own Nvidia GPU servers to build and customize proprietary AI models in-house. The move represents a rare, capital-intensive hardware investment by a major law firm to maintain control over its legal AI systems.

Casablanca-based Charikaty secured pre-seed funding at a €3 million valuation from investors including Red Tape Ventures, Faris Al-Obaid, and Faris Abdi. The startup plans to use the capital to expand its business incorporation, accounting, and legal compliance platform into Egypt and the GCC region.

Legal AI startup Harvey has become the first official AI legal assistant sponsor of the U.S. Open, securing on-court and broadcast placement to reach corporate executives and legal decision-makers. The sports marketing push follows a massive $550 million funding round at a $15.5 billion valuation.

Elon Musk's X is modifying its terms to require users to waive jury trials and handle most non-European disputes in Texas. The updated terms also hold users responsible for features that take autonomous actions, coming as X and xAI face multiple legal challenges over Grok.

China's Supreme People's Court released 24-provision opinions establishing ordinary fault liability as the general rule for AI-related torts to avoid stifling innovation. The judicial guidance also requires lawyers to verify AI-generated legal filings and mandates that AI developers produce training data evidence when defending against copyright claims.

An in-house counsel organization has filed a lawsuit in Delaware federal court against competitor The L Suite. The complaint alleges that the rival copied the group's materials to train a lawyer-focused AI chatbot.

The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the Southern District of New York. The publishers claim the tech giants scraped their journalism without consent to train products like ChatGPT and Copilot, and they are asking the court to order the destruction of AI models and datasets containing their work.

A survey of popular patent litigation venues details the expanding patchwork of districtwide and judge-specific rules governing generative AI usage in legal filings. Requirements across Texas, California, and Illinois federal courts range from mandatory disclosure certificates and prompt logging to explicit threats of Rule 11 sanctions for unverified output.

A new legal database, AI Discovery, tracks court rulings on whether generative AI prompts, outputs, and usage are discoverable in litigation or protected by work-product and attorney-client privileges. The repository covers key judicial decisions addressing third-party AI disclosures, expert methodology, and protective orders regarding public versus closed LLMs.

Plaintiffs' attorneys are increasingly leveraging AI tools and data platforms—such as JuryBall and LexisNexis Protégé—to analyze potential jurors, run online mock jury trials, and hone trial arguments. Insurance defense attorneys warn that failure to adopt similar big-data tools leaves carriers and defense counsel at a strategic disadvantage in high-stakes litigation.