Today is Halloween! This is my sixteenth(!) year (sixth on this blog) to identify stories to try to “scare” you with tales of eDiscovery, data privacy, cybersecurity information governance and AI horrors because it is, after all, an eDiscovery blog.  Let’s see how I do this year. A lot of people die in a lot of weird ways in this story!

Does this scare you?

Keyword search is still used by 95% legal and eDiscovery professionals responding to this poll! They use it even in litigation involving OpenAI!

What about this?

You know all those legal decisions in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content? There are even more examples of AI use in academic papers, where they don’t even remember to remove phrases like: “Certainly, here are”, “As of our knowledge cutoff”, “As an AI language model, I must”, or “new developments may have occurred since my last update”!

Or this?

“Regarding the Slack communications, Defendants explained that they do not have possession, custody, or control of documents from Slack because Spireon’s Slack license never included message retrieval or exportation and Spireon did not otherwise store or archive Slack messages…Because the Slack documents are not in Defendants’ possession, custody, or control, the Court denies Vaughn’s motion to compel the Slack documents.”

How about this?

Oops, he did it again! As in, Paul was explicitly put “on notice that his use of AI was leading to hallucinated cases and quotations” as early as April 25, 2025”, but he “submitted seven filings to this Court and other courts after this date that contained hallucinated cases and fabricated quotations”.

Or maybe this?

89 percent of enterprise AI usage is invisible to the organization, even with security policies in place! Ruh-roh! 😉

Have you considered this?

Builder.ai, a billion-dollar AI company that raised $450 million from Microsoft, Qatar Investment Authority, and SoftBank collapsed last month, leaving behind a trail of financial fraud, fake technology, and shattered dreams, and becoming perhaps the biggest AI fraud in startup history!

Finally, how about this? (at least for me)

My Legalweek hotel closed down in the middle of Legalweek, making this my worst Legalweek hotel story ever. But, hey, at least they had a hotel bar! 🤣

Scary, huh?  If the possibility of keyword search still in use by most eDiscovery professionals, blatantly bad AI use in academic papers, courts finding that parties don’t have possession, custody or control of their own Slack documents, AI-generated fake case citations in seven more filings (after being warned after the first filing), 89 percent of enterprise AI usage being invisible to the organization, human developers in India and Ukraine manually coding what was being marketed as AI-powered magic, or having your hotel shut down in the middle of Legalweek, then eDiscovery Today will do its best to provide useful information and best practices to enable you to relax and sleep soundly, even on Halloween at 2:17AM!*

Speaking of horrors, high school reunions are scary! 🤣

What do you think?  Is there a particular eDiscovery issue that scares you?  Please share your comments and let us know if you’d like more information on a particular topic.

Happy Halloween!

*Watch this movie and that reference will make sense.

Image Copyright © New Line Cinema

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.