Although Alexi has not yet formally responded to the lawsuit, its founder and CEO Mark Doble told me yesterday afternoon that he denies any wrongdoing and that he believes the lawsuit is based on a misunderstanding of the original licensing agreement that came to light during Clio's recent closing of its purchase of vLex, which had merged with Fastcase in 2023.
The judges had previously branded their wrong and subsequently withdrawn opinions as clerical errors. That lack of transparency undermined the judges' credibility, but both seem to have used the "clerical" excuse in a good faith effort to avoid throwing interns under the bus. According to Judge Neals, a law school intern performed legal research with ChatGPT, while Judge Wingate writes that a law clerk used Perplexity.
As the first copyright cases concerning AI reach appeals courts, EFF wants to protect important, beneficial uses of this technology-including AI for legal research. That's why we weighed in on the long-running case of Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence. This case raises at least two important issues: the use of (possibly) copyrighted material to train a machine learning AI system , and public access to legal texts.