AI × Law

ADP’s Helena Almeida was named chief AI legal officer on July 1, expanding her role to include product compliance and responsible AI. In the interview, she says CFOs are focused on making “human in the loop” meaningful, not just a box-checking exercise, as companies try to build AI into finance and payroll workflows.

Harvey says Microsoft’s Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs organization — about 2,000 lawyers and compliance professionals — will use its platform to support legal and compliance operations. The deal is a notable in-house adoption by one of the world’s largest legal departments and a meaningful customer win for Harvey.

Business Insider says legal tech has become one of Silicon Valley’s hottest sectors thanks to AI, and says investors are pouring money into startups in the space. The newsletter points readers to a roundup of 13 legal startups to watch in 2026, signaling continued venture interest in AI-enabled legal products.

A Statista chart, citing Epoch AI, shows Meta’s Llama models jumping from 1.4 trillion unique data points in early 2023 to 30 trillion by April 2025. The piece also notes the major publisher copyright suit over Llama training, including a first hearing set for September 15 in Manhattan federal court and an earlier defeat for authors in a related Meta case.

HaystackID’s webcast says generative AI has moved from experimentation to standard use in eDiscovery, with hundreds of customers using it for review and privilege and more than 100 million documents analyzed. The panel also pointed to a recent ruling in Schulte v. LinkedIn Corp. allowing search-term culling before AI-assisted review, underscoring that courts are starting to fit these workflows into established discovery rules.

Queen’s law professor Samuel Dahan and his OpenJustice platform received C$498,885 from Canada’s NSERC for a five-year project to co-design AI tools for courts. The work will focus on drafting assistance, decision standardization, evidence admissibility, and deepfake detection, with the aim of building an open-source judicial AI framework courts can inspect and trust.

A class action was filed against Microsoft and certain executives after the company’s stock fell 10%, with investors alleging Microsoft misled them about Copilot and Azure. The suit argues that Copilot had severe functionality problems that hurt adoption and put Azure revenue at risk, making this a notable AI-disclosure case for public-company litigation.

A court threw out xAI’s lawsuit against OpenAI on June 15, 2026, after Judge Rita Lin granted OpenAI’s motion to dismiss without leave to amend. The ruling is a notable litigation development in the AI sector, especially for counsel tracking AI-related disputes between major model developers.

A former Kirkland & Ellis star has launched an AI-native law firm, according to The Lawyer. It’s a notable sign that experienced lawyers are building firms around AI from the ground up, rather than merely adding tools to an existing practice.

The article says families and individuals are filing wrongful-death and product-liability suits over AI chatbots allegedly worsening suicidal ideation or contributing to deaths. It highlights cases against OpenAI and Character.AI and says one Florida federal judge let wrongful-death claims against a companion app move forward on product-liability theories, signaling real litigation risk for chatbot makers.

NYC AI startup Runlayer, backed by Vinod Khosla, says Rippling used confidential information shared during a nearly year-long partnership to build a competing AI governance product. The case is a new trade secret fight in the AI tools market and could matter to companies sharing sensitive product details with partners.

Authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson filed a class action lawsuit accusing Apple of using pirated books to train its AI models. It’s a concrete copyright-and-AI dispute that could matter to other AI developers facing claims over training data.

A federal judge in California refused to dismiss most discrimination claims in Mobley v. Workday, a challenge to Workday’s AI hiring tools. The court also rejected Workday’s effort to narrow the case to exclude later-acquired HiredScore technology and ordered Workday to produce a customer list tied to the AI features, raising exposure for employers using the tools.

Mintz unveiled an AI-focused attorney page describing its work on AI governance, product commercialization, regulatory compliance, IP, privacy, litigation, and M&A. The page also points to recent matters including a $60 million Series A investment in AI security platform Arcade and a $315 million IPO of AI-focused Berto Acquisition Corp. II, showing the firm is actively advising on AI transactions.

The Alabama State Bar released updated guidance on the ethical use of AI, saying it does not create new rules but applies existing professional duties to AI tools. The guidance stresses lawyer responsibility for verifying AI outputs, adopting written AI policies, and reviewing vendor data-retention and security practices. It also points to recent Alabama sanctions over a brief that cited nonexistent AI-generated authority.

Professor Samuel Dahan’s Conflict Analytics Lab received $498,885 in NSERC funding for a five-year project to develop an open-source “judicial AI” framework. The work focuses on court drafting, consistency, and detecting manipulated evidence, including deepfakes—an effort aimed at making AI outputs more transparent and trustworthy for judges and legal professionals.

A Florida lawsuit says artificial intelligence contributed to a patient’s delayed cancer diagnosis, raising fresh questions about who is liable when AI is used in medical decision-making. The case is notable for litigators because it could help define exposure for AI-related harms outside the traditional legal-tech lane.

Deloitte’s latest global survey says legal AI has moved past experimentation: 61% of legal teams are actively deploying AI, while only 2% report no adoption. The report also says 80% of legal departments increased AI budgets, and that AI could automate about 28% of legal work within two to three years, signaling real pressure on pricing, workflows, and in-house versus outside-counsel work.

BigLaw firms are creating more AI-specific roles for associates and partners, not just C-suite leaders. Jenner & Block is hiring multiple AI litigation associates, while Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Pillsbury and Greenberg Traurig are also adding or seeking AI talent. The shift shows AI is becoming both a staffing strategy and a new source of client work around risk, contracts and compliance.

Latham & Watkins says its digital infrastructure team advises on AI-related infrastructure, including helping AI and technology companies secure long-term power resources and working on data centers, chip factories, and other AI infrastructure. The page also says the firm surpassed US$1 trillion in digital infrastructure transactions during H1 2026, underscoring how central AI buildout work has become for major firms.