* Mark Kelly hires Arnold & Porter to sue Pete Hegseth and the Defense Department for threatening to illegally slash his pension. [ The New Republic] * Jerome Powell hires Williams & Connolly to deal with DOJ threats. [ New York Times] * It's striking that critics of the Maduro capture cite specific text from the Constitution and international treaties, and the Deputy Attorney General cites "nuh uh." [ The Hill]
Effective discovery requires more than compliance - it requires strategy. Litigators can balance expansive discovery rights and privacy concerns without slowing cases down through practical, results-focused approaches that consider proportionality, electronically stored information management, and the specific discovery rules applicable to their jurisdiction.
This script is based on a theory proposed by Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale Law School. Ackerman's idea is laid out in his 1991 book We The People: Foundations, and is discussed in the second of his Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures of 2006. It's gained prominence since the 2024 election and the wholesale assault on our governmental system by Trump.
AI will replace some tasks, reshape many roles, and change how legal services get delivered, but it is far less likely to replace the full lawyer function where judgment, strategy, persuasion, and accountability still drive value.
With polls showing more Americans now favor abolishing ICE than keeping it, a lot of people will be disappointed to learn that the law is set up to make it almost impossible to hold anyone accountable for killing Renee Good. From sovereign immunity, to the Federal Officer Removal Statute, to the decline of Bivens, to qualified immunity, the whole system is arrayed to shield federal agents from legal redress.
Since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, the frequency of court submissions riddled with AI-hallucinated gibberish has increased exponentially. Now, more than three years later, it seems that not a week goes by without a headline about yet another case in which a lawyer has submitted briefs to the court full of AI-hallucinated gibberish.
A majority of justices say this 16-judge court likely has jurisdiction over lawsuits regarding thousands of National Institutes of Health federal research grants that the Trump administration has tried to terminate, as well as other fights concerning canceled grants. If the Supreme Court sticks by its current thinking in final rulings, the Court of Federal Claims could be handling fights over countless grants that the Trump administration and future higher ed-targeting presidencies may try to cancel in the future.
A year or so ago, most legal departments were still testing. AI pilots. Workflow trials. Small process experiments. Everyone was learning cautiously. The stakes were relatively low, and the work was labeled "innovation," which made imperfection forgivable. Then something shifted. Those same pilots became part of day-to-day delivery, and the business started relying on them. Sometimes intentionally, because early results looked good.
They don't drive it. They don't manage it. They don't control it. They let it control them. And then one day, they look up and realize discovery closed last week, the client is asking why nobody has taken the key depo, the adjuster wants a status report "by the end of the day," and the partner is asking the question that makes your stomach drop: "Where are we on this file?"