This week’s kitchen sink for September 4, 2026 (with meme from Gates Dogfish) discusses an AI hallucination milestone, AI hijacking “Zee Germans” & 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! I can help with that! 😁

Here is the kitchen sink for September 4 of ten-ish stories that I didn’t get to this week, with a comment from me about each:

We’re up to 2,009(!) AI hallucination cases and counting. Yep, we’re over the 2,000 mark. 1,082 of them this year – with four months still to go!

When the agent becomes a witness: an Oxford-style tutorial on AI evidence, accountability and discovery: In another of his Oxford-style tutorial analyses, Rob Robinson examines an important question: when an autonomous or semi-autonomous AI agent searches, classifies, recommends, or acts, can its records reliably establish what it actually did? As usual, he digs deep into things like potential relevant materials to check, responsibility and accountability, and the fact that traditional custodian-based preservation isn’t enough anymore. Excellent stuff.

At ILTACON, Legal AI Confronts “Good Enough”: More excellent stuff – this time from Kristin Calve in her recap of ILTACON on the CCBJ blog. By “good enough”, she means it’s no longer simply about what legal AI can do, but whether its incremental benefits justify its costs and whether paying for additional capability produces meaningful value. All important things to consider.

ILTACON 2026: Context is king – but transformation is still the hard part: Speaking of ILTACON (another segue!), Caroline Hill’s terrific and detailed write-up of the conference states: If there was a single word that defined ILTACON 2026, it was probably “context”. Which is what I said in my write-up! Great minds think alike! And, BTW, I didn’t copy Caroline’s take on that (even though her write-up was published 2 days ago) as I just saw it a short time ago. Honest! 😁

EDRM published its new map and the reasoning behind what it kept: Rob Robinson covers the rationale and discussion behind the finalization of the EDRM 2.0 model (released Tuesday), including responses to public comments from the project trustees, Craig Ball’s contention that the original EDRM model wasn’t broken, and my response to Craig (agreeing that it wasn’t broken, but also that it doesn’t matter because everyone thinks of it as a workflow). All important perspectives on how we got here.

I rented a car, and within hours, my driver’s license was for sale: Data breaches are now unfolding in real time. Sigh.

ESI Protocol Held Not to Apply to Non-Party: Michael Berman discusses a case on the EDRM blog where a law firm non-party tried to use the parties’ ESI protocol to justify redactions while saying its provisions requiring negotiations regarding search terms don’t apply to it. The court ordered in camera review – rightfully so.

NCAA Swaps Law Firms After Its Biglaw Lawyers Called Rhode Island Judge ‘Dumb’ In Email CC Disaster: Joe Patrice covers a case where the NCAA’s lawyers ridiculed the plaintiff, his mother and the “dumb judge in RI” in an email thread that ultimately got forwarded to the plaintiff’s attorney. Stupid is as stupid does.

The Argument for Encouraging Student Use of AI in First-Year Law: For all those who say that 1L students should struggle in their first year with no AI, Robert Diab offers an alternative viewpoint (with appropriate parameters). I agree with him – there’s never a better time than early on to learn how to leverage AI the right way, as long as it is treated as a tool and not a crutch.

When Clients Ask About Quantum, Will Their Lawyers Be Ready?: It’s been a while since Ralph Losey asked us to take a quantum leap in our thinking. His argument in the third article in his series on the EDRM blog: lawyers don’t need to understand quantum physics, but they should develop enough “quantum literacy” to recognize when the technology creates legal, business, or evidentiary issues for their clients. Couldn’t agree more.

How a “partner-only” law firm used AI to replace its associates: Angela Delvecchio of Project Counsel Media discusses how two lawyers started a firm and decided to use AI to handle the associate stuff. Unlike the “chicken and the egg” dilemma, if all firms do this, there won’t be any more associates to make partner. 😉

OpenAI agents hijacked German website before Hugging Face hack, report claims: Achtung! Not “Zee Germans” too?!? Apparently, this one happened back in May. And all of this is before OpenAI just released GPT-6 Astra, which happened yesterday! The AI arms race continues – consequences be damned! 😟

Hope you enjoyed the kitchen sink for September 4, 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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