AI × Law

Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory has signed an agreement to acquire Brightflag, a cloud-based provider specializing in AI-powered legal spend and matter management. The acquisition will integrate Brightflag’s solutions into Wolters Kluwer’s ELM Solutions, enhancing its legal operations and spend management offerings.

Anthropic, maker of the Claude AI model, appointed its first Head of Claude for Legal, while legal AI company Harvey hired a Chief Revenue Officer. These personnel moves signal a focus on deep legal expertise and scaling sales within the legal AI sector.

ServiceNow released "Otto for Legal Service Delivery," an application leveraging generative AI to enhance legal department productivity. It streamlines legal work by summarizing requests and matters, providing actionable answers from knowledge articles, and automating legal request triage.

Raj De, leader of Mayer Brown's global Cybersecurity & Data Privacy and National Security practices, also chairs the firm's Artificial Intelligence Task Force. His extensive background in government and private practice positions him to advise on cutting-edge legal and policy issues at the intersection of technology and law.

Fintech AI company Interface AI, fresh off a $30M Series A round, is hiring its first Head of Legal. The role emphasizes proficiency in generative AI tools for legal workflows, alongside core responsibilities in commercial, privacy, and corporate law. This signals a growing trend of legal departments seeking AI-native talent.

Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law has updated its database access agreement to include specific guidelines for generative AI use. Users must agree to not upload sensitive, copyrighted, or proprietary information, acknowledge AI limitations, and adhere to university academic integrity policies regarding AI tools.

Prominent mass tort attorney Mikal Watts is investing a seven-figure sum to develop a proprietary AI tool for personal injury and mass tort cases. He plans to partner with private equity firms acquiring back-office functions of personal injury firms through MSOs, aiming to integrate his AI across their networks to boost efficiency and case processing.

A new article breaks down the estimated compliance costs for a 5-person startup under the EU AI Act, ranging from €15k-€30k for limited-risk systems to €40k-€90k+ for high-risk systems like hiring or credit scoring. The analysis provides a line-item budget for legal review, technical documentation, data governance, and ongoing monitoring, highlighting that architecture choices made early can significantly impact these costs.

In the ongoing OpenAI copyright litigation, Judge Stein denied motions from The New York Times, Daily News, and Ziff Davis to add new contributory copyright infringement claims against Microsoft. This follows the plaintiffs' voluntary dismissal of prior claims after a Supreme Court ruling, shaping the future scope of the high-profile copyright dispute.

Axiom Law, drawing on insights from PayPal and Uber counsel, provides a checklist for legal teams to manage AI-generated marketing content compliance. The guidance emphasizes adapting existing risk frameworks and focusing on speed and volume, rather than treating AI as an entirely new risk paradigm.

A federal court in the Southern District of New York has ordered OpenAI to preserve ChatGPT output log data, marking a significant development in treating AI-generated content as electronically stored information (ESI) subject to legal holds. This ruling signals that companies must now proactively preserve AI artifacts with the same diligence applied to traditional ESI like emails and documents, or face potential sanctions under Rule 37(e).

Meta Platforms has agreed to pay $1.4 billion to settle a Texas lawsuit alleging it unlawfully used Texans' biometric data to train its AI facial-recognition program, DeepFace, without consent. This follows a $650 million settlement in Illinois and highlights the increasing legal risks for companies using biometric data in AI applications.

AI platform Runlayer has filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York against HR software company Rippling, alleging trade secret misappropriation, unfair competition, and breach of contract. Runlayer claims Rippling developed a competing product based on its proprietary AI technology after a commercial relationship between the two companies. The suit seeks a preliminary injunction and expedited discovery.

A federal judge allowed Reddit's claim that Perplexity AI and SerpApi LLC violated the DMCA by circumventing technological protection measures to scrape content. This ruling could offer content hosts a new strategy against AI companies that harvest data without licenses, simplifying the path to liability by sidestepping complex fair use arguments.

A coalition led by The New York Times has asked a U.S. court to sanction OpenAI in a copyright case concerning AI training data. The outcome could reshape the economics of journalism and AI development, with implications for legal boundaries of training-data use and compensation for copyrighted content.

News Corp CEO Robert Thomson announced plans for new legal action against AI companies that scrape content and, notably, against businesses that purchase AI products built on allegedly stolen intellectual property. This aggressive stance, alongside existing licensing deals with OpenAI and Meta, indicates a dual strategy of litigation and partnership to protect its content.

The Delhi High Court refused to issue an interim injunction against OpenAI in a copyright lawsuit filed by Asian News International (ANI), stating that OpenAI's use of copyrighted material for AI training could be considered 'fair dealing.' This preliminary ruling offers legal breathing room for AI developers globally and highlights India's stance on balancing AI innovation with copyright protection, although the substantive lawsuit remains pending.

LexisNexis is rolling out new AI features across its legal and business products, including Protégé for drafting, workflow automation, and agentic workflows. It also says Lexis+ with Protégé, Lexis Create+, and Tolley+ with Protégé are now part of its AI lineup, underscoring how major legal vendors are embedding generative AI into core research and drafting tools.

The University of the Philippines College of Law adopted a new policy for first-year JD courses starting AY 2026-2027. It requires core subjects to be taught offline where possible and bans generative AI in writing assignments, while allowing limited faculty-supervised use of AI-based research tools with disclosure requirements.

Microsoft will implement Harvey across its corporate, external, and legal affairs operations, deepening its existing relationship with the legal AI platform. The move is notable because it puts a major enterprise legal team on Harvey and signals continued adoption of AI tools for legal and compliance workflows.