AI & the Law: A Federal Courts Newsletter - January 15, 2025

Bloomberg Law Launches New AI Assistant and Bloomberg Law Answers
Criv Connection (AALL) | January 15, 2025

This week, Bloomberg Law released two new generative AI-powered features: Bloomberg Law Answers and Bloomberg Law AI Assistant. The enhancements are designed to provide quick answers to legal questions and analysis of a wide range of documents on the BLAW platform.

Bloomberg Law Answers generates a response to queries entered in the main search bar, drawing from relevant legal sources including federal and state court opinions, statutes and regulations, Practical Guidance, Bloomberg Law News, and secondary sources like books and manuals.

The chat-based Bloomberg Law AI Assistant lets users summarize and ask questions about documents, including court opinions, court rules, U.S. Code and CFR sections, state statutes and regulations, session laws, constitutions, and select secondary sources.

 

Judge Critiques Perplexity AI's Efforts to Ditch Dow Jones Suit
Bloomberg Law | January 14, 2025

A judge cast doubt on Perplexity AI Inc.'s arguments that her Manhattan federal court lacks personal jurisdiction over the AI company in a copyright lawsuit brought by the publishers of the Wall Street Journal and New York Post.

The AI startup fielded Judge Katherine Polk Failla’s questions during an hour long hearing Tuesday about whether the US District Court for the Southern District of New York can hear the case accusing it of feeding news publishers’ original content into a database, resulting in AI outputs that regurgitated articles from outlets published by Dow Jones & Co. and NYP Holdings Inc. Perplexity AI in December indicated it will seek to dismiss the suit because its service isn’t directed at New York specifically, and alternatively to transfer the case to California.

 

AI, Gen AI, And Agent AI: What Do They Mean For The Future Of Legal Work?
Above The Law | January 14, 2025

All week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), I’ve been bombarded with session after session on AI and what it can do. I have seen more AI-based products than I can recall, many of which will never see the light of day. AI is everywhere at CES. It’s a bit much, frankly.

But on Thursday, a CES panel presentation tackled a question that’s been on my mind all week. What do all these AI tools mean for the future of work in general? What do businesses and, for that matter, workers need to do to prepare for the brave new world that everyone here seems to be promising and promoting?

A related question for me, of course, is how all these tools will impact what lawyers and legal professionals do and how they work. What will the potential AI tools mean for everyone who works in legal?

The panel presentation was entitled Embracing AI: Revolutionizing the Future of Work and featured several HR/AI experts.

 

Biden Administration Adopts Rules to Guide A.I.’s Global Spread
New York Times | January 13, 2025

The Biden administration issued sweeping rules on Monday governing how A.I. chips and models can be shared with foreign countries, in an attempt to set up a global framework that will guide how artificial intelligence spreads around the world in the years to come.

With the power of A.I. rapidly growing, the Biden administration said the rules were necessary to keep a transformational technology under the control of the United States and its allies, and out of the hands of adversaries that could use it to augment their militaries, carry out cyberattacks and otherwise threaten the United States.

Tech companies have protested the new rules, saying they threaten their sales and the future prospects of the American tech industry.

Read article as a PDF

 

Courts Beginning to Set Standards for Evidence Relying Upon Artificial Intelligence
New York Law Journal | January 10, 2025

As the use of generative AI becomes more commonplace in the practice of law, courts have been hesitant to regulate its use in litigation. A recent decision from the Surrogate’s Court in Saratoga County, however, suggests that trend may be about to change.

There has been less attention given by courts regarding how to handle the use of generative AI when there is no readily apparent defect in its use. A recent decision in Matter of Weber, 2024 NY Slip Op 24258, 2024 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 8609 (Sur. Ct. Oct. 10, 2024), however, has addressed this question head-on. In Weber, the court conducted a hearing on a claim for breach of fiduciary duty. In connection with that hearing, both parties presented evidence relating to the proper measure of damages, including reports and testimony from damages experts. One party’s damages expert testified that he replied upon Microsoft Copilot, a large language model generative AI chatbot, in crosschecking his damages calculations resulting from the alleged breach.

Although the court independently found that damages expert not credible, it separately addressed the reliance upon generative AI. First, the court focused on the damages expert’s inability to detail the specific process by which he utilized Microsoft Copilot. The damages expert could not recall the specific input or prompt that he utilized and did not know what sources Microsoft Copilot relied upon or how it arrived at the output relied upon by the damages expert.

Don't have access to the New York Law Journal? Read article on Bloomberg Law

 

NJ Says Existing Anti-Discrimination Law Applies To Using AI
Law360 | January 10, 2025

New Jersey's attorney general issued guidance clarifying that the Garden State's discrimination law applies to "algorithmic discrimination," or discrimination and bias-based harassment stemming from the use of artificial intelligence and other similar technologies.

Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin and the state Division of Civil Rights said in a joint statement Thursday the guidance is intended to help companies ensure their use of AI and other automated decision-making tools complies with the law. Among other areas, the tools are being used in employment, housing, places of public accommodation, credit and contracting, according to the guidance.

 

Meta Secretly Trained Its AI on a Notorious Piracy Database, Newly Unredacted Court Docs Reveal
Wired | January 9, 2025

Meta just lost a major fight in its ongoing legal battle with a group of authors suing the company for copyright infringement over how it trained its artificial intelligence models. Against the company’s wishes, a court unredacted information alleging that Meta used Library Genesis (LibGen), a notorious so-called shadow library of pirated books that originated in Russia, to help train its generative AI language models.

The case, Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms, was one of the earliest copyright lawsuits filed against a tech company over its AI training practices. Its outcome, along with those of dozens of similar cases working their way through courts in the United States, will determine whether technology companies can legally use creative works to train AI moving forward and could either entrench AI’s most powerful players or derail them.

Vince Chhabria, a judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, ordered both Meta and the plaintiffs on Wednesday to file full versions of a batch of documents after calling Meta’s approach to redacting them “preposterous,” adding that, for the most part, "there is not a single thing in those briefs that should be sealed.” Chhabria ruled that Meta was not pushing to redact the materials in order to protect its business interests but instead to “avoid negative publicity.” The documents were originally filed late last year remained publicly unavailable in unredacted form until now.

In his order, Chhabria referenced an internal quote from a Meta employee, included in the documents, in which they speculated, “If there is media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated, such as LibGen, this may undermine our negotiating position with regulators on these issues.” Meta declined to comment.

 

IP Forecast: OpenAI, Microsoft Look To Toss NYT Case
Law360 | January 9, 2025

OpenAI and its backers at Microsoft will try persuading a New York judge to dismiss claims in one of the major copyright suits against them, with arguments that using news stories to train the startup's artificial intelligence model is a "transformative" use.