This week’s kitchen sink for July 3, 2026 (with meme from Gates Dogfish) discusses whether legal tech is doomed, Google’s $4.7 billion bill coming due & 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! That really happened! 🤣

Here is the kitchen sink for July 3 of ten-ish stories that I didn’t get to this week, with a comment from me about each:

We’re up to 1,695 AI hallucination cases and counting. Hey, at least it’s not 1,776! 🤣

The Big Boys Arrive: Is Today’s Legal Tech Doomed?: Will the “big boys” of AI kill legal tech? Recent moves by frontier AI companies like Perplexity and Anthropic into legal research signal a profound shift beyond typical legal tech competition. Along with OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, they may be shaping the future of legal tech. Ruh-roh! (if you’re a legal tech company, that is).

Microsoft Moves Your Chat: I never did know who moved my cheese, but thanks to Greg Buckles, we know that Microsoft moved your chat. As he notes: “Microsoft has been migrating Teams private channel data from participant mailboxes to new dedicated channel Group mailboxes since September 2025 and started deleting the ownerless or archived channels June 5^th. Redgrave LLP’s Staci Kaliner wrote an excellent summary of the changes and the potential impact on holds, compliance and eDiscovery.” As always, Greg is keeping us informed of notable Microsoft changes.

Why a single Signal recovery key is a preservation problem: As Rob Robinson notes, the FBI and CISA warned (or – if you prefer – sent a signal) that Russian intelligence operators have added a step to their Signal phishing campaign: tricking targets into surrendering the backup recovery key that unlocks the account’s backed-up message history. He states that the shift turns a confidentiality problem into a preservation problem – the same archive that makes the attack valuable can also matter to the legal process.

Another A.I. Protective Order: As Michael Berman notes on the EDRM blog, “Protective orders addressing the use of A.I. to review materials produced to an opponent in discovery are becoming routine.” This one is a good example. It focuses on “Protected Material” and the Stipulation notably ends with: “The undersigned counsel certify that Artificial Intelligence was not used to prepare the foregoing document.” 😁

I had Gemini and Claude write my email replies – but only one sounds like me: You probably don’t care if you sound like Chandraveer Mathur, but the examples he provides does point to one as a more succinct, on point reply than the other. You’ll have to read it to find out which one. 😉

Satya Nadella’s AI Warning Is a Sales Pitch: Here, the author suggests that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s argument that businesses need to be able to easily switch between artificial intelligence models is correct but elides the fact, if implemented, his advice would direct investment toward Azure, Microsoft’s cloud business, which benefits regardless of which model wins. This author says they also need to be able to easily switch between cloud providers too. Agreed.

Council clears the AI Act rewrite as the enforcement clock keeps ticking: Does this matter to eDiscovery professionals? If Rob Robinson is covering it, you know it matters to us, as well as cybersecurity, data privacy and regulatory compliance professionals too. Some deadlines are delayed, but the EU AI Act’s broader Aug. 2, 2026, application date remains on track.

Musk’s X poses “serious risk to Americans’ privacy,” advocates warn FTC: Advocates are warning the Federal Trade Commission that it must keep close watch over Elon Musk’s X and firmly reject a recent bid to end the agency’s ongoing audits of the platform’s data handling. I hope they succeed: if anything, auditing the handling of data by social media sites should be increased, not eliminated.

Passing the Controls: The Art of Legal Judgment, Mentorship, and the Next Generation in the Age of AI: Another terrific article by Judge Ralph Artigliere (ret.) on the EDRM blog about the state of transition which the legal profession finds itself in the face of AI. His central message is that legal profession’s greatest long-term risk is not that AI will replace lawyers, but that overreliance on AI could interrupt the transmission of professional judgment from one generation to the next. As usual, he discusses ways to keep that from happening, stressing the increased importance of mentorship, the need for junior lawyers to participate in activities that enable them to observe experienced practitioners exercising professional judgment.

Google loses long-running appeal of record EU fine, will have to cough up $4.7 billion: Whomp, whomp! Google was handed a record-setting 4.34 billion-euro ($4.9 billion) fine in Europe for abusing its monopoly on Android way back in 2018! They finally have to may most of it (after getting it trimmed a bit). Google’s parent company Alphabet reported total annual revenue last year of $402.84 billion. I think they can afford it.

Hope you enjoyed the kitchen sink for July 3, 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.