AI × Law

LexisNexis announced the U.S. general availability of Protégé, a personalized AI assistant powered by agentic AI capabilities. Integrated into Lexis+ AI and Microsoft Word, the tool can autonomously draft motions, generate deposition questions, and connect to firm document management systems.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed an amicus brief in Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence arguing that using copyrighted material for AI training can qualify as transformative fair use. The DOJ urged the Third Circuit to overturn a lower court's narrow analysis on intermediate copying and apply a flexible case-by-case fair use test.

A new report from the UNSW Centre for the Future of the Legal Profession reviewed over 520 cases across ten jurisdictions, revealing a major increase in GenAI misuse in courtrooms. The study found self-represented litigants are behind the vast majority of fabricated citations and hallucinated legal reasoning, though trained lawyers were also implicated.

E-discovery expert Phil Favro and legal commentator Michael Berman highlighted the growing evidentiary challenges of authenticating AI-generated videos and deepfakes in court. Analyzing recent precedent like U.S. v. Belt, they recommend litigators establish strict chain of custody, record hardware and software operational parameters, and preserve original native files to satisfy gatekeeping requirements.

Canadian law firm Torkin Manes has appointed partner Roland Hung as co-chair of its newly launched artificial intelligence and innovation group. Hung will co-lead the multi-disciplinary practice alongside technology group chair Lisa R. Lifshitz.

Legal-tech startup Newcode has closed a Series A funding round, bringing its total raised capital to €17 million.

Brazil's top electoral court ruled in a case involving an AI-generated image of former President Jair Bolsonaro, establishing a legal definition for political deepfakes. The court defined deepfakes as synthetic content manipulated via AI with enough realism to alter the image, voice, or speech of any person.

Goodwin announced plans to spend approximately $25 million per year to purchase and develop its own proprietary AI platforms to gain a competitive edge and protect intellectual property. The firm has already rolled out a custom AI tool for venture financing as law firms increasingly shift toward bespoke software.

Thomson Reuters has embedded its CoCounsel Legal AI platform directly into HighQ, enabling automated document review, due diligence, and drafting within HighQ's governed workspace. The integration also introduces HighQ MCP, built on Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, allowing third-party AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude to securely access HighQ matter context.

Wordsmith AI has joined the iManage Technology Partner Program to integrate its agentic legal workflows with iManage's document and knowledge platform. The API-based integration allows Wordsmith's AI agents to securely draw on a legal team's internal institutional knowledge to execute drafting, contract review, and intake tasks.

Weil, Gotshal & Manges collaborated with Google Cloud to help develop and deploy Gemini Enterprise for Legal, gaining early access to emerging capabilities. The firm is also deploying its proprietary AI-powered litigation intelligence platform, BenchMark, across its litigation department.

Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP has named Kelly Graves as its first chief artificial intelligence strategy and innovation officer. Graves previously served as the firm's director of innovation and attorney advancement.

Doug Pitt and partners have launched Manila, a new AI product designed to reduce discovery costs and help small to mid-sized law firms process growing volumes of evidence.

Legal drafting platform Avvoka launched Curate, an AI-powered standalone tool that reviews a law firm's prior transaction documents to identify and surface the strongest versions of clauses for gold-standard templates. Developed with Am Law 100 firms, the tool connects with AI assistants like Harvey, Copilot, and Claude while keeping human lawyers in loop to approve firm positions.

AI training data platform AfterQuery is reportedly nearing a $3.2B valuation, scaling rapidly by gathering expert reasoning data from fields like law, finance, and engineering. The startup notably collaborated with legal AI company Legora to build BAR, an agent evaluation benchmark containing over 5,000 legal cases across 28 practice areas.

Oslo-based legal AI startup Newcode has secured $13.5 million in a Series A funding round to expand its platform. The investment follows a $6.5 million seed round raised earlier in the year backed by The LegalTech Fund and Alliance VC.

The U.S. Judicial Conference's Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules has opted to defer action on proposed amendments addressing AI-generated evidence and deepfakes. Rather than advancing the rules for public comment, the committee plans to vet the proposals with technology experts at its upcoming fall meeting.

Legal tech startup Eve Legal has asked a San Francisco federal judge to toss a patent lawsuit filed by rival AI.Law, arguing the contested patent is invalid. Eve claims the patent covers abstract concepts that merely describe using ordinary AI tools to draft legal documents.

A California federal judge is weighing whether the state's Fair Employment and Housing Act applies to a proposed class action alleging Workday's AI hiring tools discriminate against older, minority, and disabled applicants. Workday argues the law shouldn't cover out-of-state applicants, while plaintiffs contend jurisdiction applies because the algorithms were developed at Workday's California headquarters.

The International Bar Association's Future of Legal Services Commission released its 2024 report, concluding that the global legal sector lacks preparedness for AI despite its immediate importance. Survey results across six global regions show that many practitioners still do not treat AI adoption as a priority issue.