This week’s kitchen sink for August 28, 2026 (with meme from Gates Dogfish) discusses AI as evidence, draconian rules for California lawyers & 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 wished for this. 🤣

Here is the kitchen sink for August 28 of ten-ish stories that I didn’t get to this week, with a comment from me about each:

We’re up to 1,981 AI hallucination cases and counting. Generative AI might be driving a spike in pro se filings, but it is not leading to success in the courtroom.

Law Firms Are Buying AI: But Are They Really Using It?: Stephen Embry provides a frank discussion of a report from Harbor in Above the Law that states (in Stephen’s words): “law firms are buying AI but they don’t know what the hell to do with it.” Of course, Stephen also notes that “the report does not reveal how many people were surveyed, or even if anyone was surveyed” and “We aren’t told which firms were involved, or their sizes”, among other things, so “we have to take them with a grain of salt”. He also notes that “a fair amount of the report reads as if it was generated by AI.” Other than that, he loves it! 🤣

Google’s legal AI launch is narrower than its connector roster suggests: Google Cloud launched Gemini Enterprise for Legal in preview Aug. 25, naming legal teams at Cleary Gottlieb, Freshfields, Weil and Williams & Connolly in the announcement. Rob Robinson breaks down what the announcement means here.

Use of Personal Email by Government Personnel: This is not the most famous use of personal email by government personnel ever (some of you will get that reference), but Michael Berman discusses this case on the EDRM blog. Using personal email and personal cell phones doesn’t make the data any less discoverable.

Disney v. Midjourney: When the Gen AI Output Is the Evidence: Kelly Twigger discusses the latest AI as evidence case, which has two stipulated orders governing production of subscriber prompts and outputs. Some unique aspects to it, such as the sampling part of the protocol, which is a different approach than the consolidated OpenAI copyright litigation.

ChatGPT can log into your web accounts without you now – but should you let it?: Uh, no. Just ask Hugging Face.

California lawmakers have days to decide whether to put personal citation verification into statute: As Rob Robinson reports, California’s Legislature has until Aug. 31 to pass Senate Bill 574, which would impose express duties on lawyers who use generative AI and require personal verification of citations in papers covered by Code of Civil Procedure Section 128.7. As rewritten in the Assembly, the bill would also bar delegating the practice of law to generative AI, require disclosing generative AI use to the court for every document submitted, and forbid arbitrators from handing any part of their decision-making to a generative AI tool. I get the intent but it seems a bit draconian to me. 🤔

Shadow AI: A Growing Problem for Canadian Courts: As in the Canadian judiciary using it. I also added this one because it was profiled by Jeff Brandt in the PinHawk Law Technology newsletter. Welcome back, Jeff!

A Request for “Three-Strata Validation” Was Denied: Interesting case covered by Michael Berman on the EDRM blog. Plaintiffs asked for “three-strata validation” as follows: validation of documents coded as non-responsive (i.e., sampling of the null set), validation of documents coded as responsive, and validation of documents excluded from the universe of ESI material subject to discovery review (i.e., not even collected). They only got the first one. Meat Loaf never sang it, but one out of three is bad (for them, at least).

Meta pressures rival platforms to curb underage use: After Meta agreed to pay (over ten years) up to $17 billion over allegations that its products harmed children and implement restrictions on its use by teens, the company posted an “open letter” to TikTok and YouTube, urging them to “join us in supporting teens” by agreeing to the new restrictions. In doing all this, their stock value went up $13 billion in one day. So, it looks like they’ll have no problem coming up with the money. 😉

Report: Nvidia to acquire AI model repository Hugging Face for $13 billion: Stated in another way, the equivalent of one-day’s stock value growth for Meta. 😉 Hey, at least OpenAI will have someone new to hack now! 🤣

OpenAI, Anthropic and 100 companies sound alarm over urgent AI danger: They all say that a wave of AI-powered cyber attacks is coming and that the world is not prepared. Of course, as the article notes, the letter (published by OpenAI here) is signed by many of the companies that are making exactly the AI technology that has already been used in such attacks. Just sayin’. 😠

Hope you enjoyed the kitchen sink for August 28, 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.

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