This week’s kitchen sink for April 24, 2026 (with meme from Gates Dogfish) discusses the billable hour, “Mother Google”, AI taking yet more jobs & more!

Why “the kitchen sink”? Find out here! 🙂

The Kitchen Sink is even better when you can include a brand-new eDiscovery meme courtesy of Gates Dogfish, the meme channel dedicated to eDiscovery people and created by Aaron Patton. For more great eDiscovery memes, follow Gates Dogfish on LinkedIn here! You bet Jurassic Park they don’t care! 🤣

Here is the kitchen sink for April 24 of ten-ish stories that I didn’t get to this week, with a comment from me about each:

We’re up to 1,348 AI hallucination cases and counting. But hallucinations are different for eDiscovery solutions. Here’s why.

Note: Rob Robinson has launched his 1H 2026 eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey, with more AI and business-related questions! Consider taking the survey here – it’s a terrific barometer on eDiscovery business trends!

When agents act: the Rule 26(f) disclosure threshold for agentic AI in eDiscovery: Speaking of Rob, he’s on fire this week with two terrific articles. This one discusses when the use of agentic AI must be disclosed during the Rule 26(f) meet-and-confer process. Rob references the recent significant Morgan v. V2X, Inc. case as a springboard to examine how courts and practitioners are beginning to define disclosure obligations in this new context. His article also discusses how Agentic AI stresses the framework of FRCP 26(f) and Sedona Principle 6 in ways TAR did not because it involves technology making coding decisions instead of assisting them. Great article.

The billable hour’s information problem in eDiscovery: Ditto for this article. Here, Rob discusses how the traditional billable-hour model is increasingly misaligned with how value is actually created in modern eDiscovery. Rob argues that AI isn’t just improving efficiency – it’s also exposing inefficiencies that were previously hidden via the manual processes that have been driving so many legal tasks. I might quibble with how hidden those inefficiencies were but couldn’t agree more with Rob’s contention that the billable hour as increasingly outdated in eDiscovery because it measures effort rather than insight.

Florida Officials Say ChatGPT May Have Advised Gunman in School Shooting: This may be one of the first instances of a criminal investigation being opened against an AI model. The shooter, who killed two and wounded six, reportedly asked the chatbot how the country would react to a shooting at Florida State and when the busiest time was at the student union; OpenAI says “ChatGPT provided factual responses to questions with information that could be found broadly across public sources on the internet, and it did not encourage or promote illegal or harmful activity.”

Google’s new Deep Research and Deep Research Max agents can search the web and your private data: Great news! Oh wait, what’s that last part? Ruh-roh! 😉 More on this in a few stories.

Request for Broad “Apex” Executive Discovery Replaced by Phased Discovery Order: Interesting proportionality dispute involving discovery from seven apex executives of defendant covered by Michael Berman on the EDRM blog. Plaintiffs wanted to use 300 search terms. Purdue suggested 73. What happened? Read the article to find out.

While You Were Awai: eDiscovery Landscape Evolves: See what they did there? 😉 On the ACEDS blog, Jason Richard of Streemview and Arnold Blair of MoloLamken LLP discuss the rapid transformation taking place within the eDiscovery landscape involving increasing data complexity and regulatory/compliance pressures, skills the modern eDiscovery professional must have, and (big surprise!) that AI is reshaping eDiscovery workflows. Good comprehensive article.

A Newspaper Is Allegedly Slapping People’s Names on AI Stories Without Their Permission: This week’s sign of the apocalypse? Apparently, a new piece of Claude-based AI tech is getting rolled out in the newsrooms of the McClatchy Media family of newspapers, and some journalists are being forced to take partial bylines, even when an AI system “wrote” their article. “If they don’t have the ability in their contract to remove their byline, we’re going to use their name,” a company leader reportedly said. Well, isn’t that special! 🤣

Meta to Cut 10% of Work Force in A.I. Push: The layoffs affect about 8,000 employees, with Meta also planning to close 6,000 open roles, as the company focuses on AI. Sigh.

Report: Meta will train AI agents by tracking employees’ mouse, keyboard use: Can’t do that when you’re letting them go, now can ya? 😉

OpenAI tackles a bad habit people have when interacting with AI: People tend to paste personal data into AI tools such as ChatGPT, so OpenAI has released Privacy Filter, an open-weight model designed to detect and redact PII in text. Good move! Now, who wants to test it out? 🤣

Sure. Take all the information out there. And then what? Use it to spy, sell ads, extort people?: Eino Nieminen of Project Counsel Media discusses the article about Google’s new capabilities linked above. As he notes: “the big news is that Google can and will process your files, cloud resources, data sets. With these data tucked into your profile on Mother Google, the kindergarten-color outfit will output a report with charts and analysis…This is a feature for you. Trust Mother Google.” I sense a bit of sarcasm! 🤣

Hope you enjoyed the kitchen sink for April 24, 2026! Back next week with another edition!

So, what do you think? Which story is your favorite one? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the authors and speakers themselves, 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.