This week’s kitchen sink for September 18, 2026 (with meme from Gates Dogfish) discusses lawyers being miserable, “Bulldog” leaving a big discovery mess & 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’s crazy and stupid, Love! 🤣
Here is the kitchen sink for September 18 of ten-ish stories that I didn’t get to this week, with a comment from me about each:
We’re up to 2,041(!) AI hallucination cases and counting. Hey, the good news is that we only added three cases this week. Still, AI hallucinations can be murder…or at least murder your career. 😉
Claude users found ways around safeguards for bioweapons research: Remember last week when I covered the story that “Anthropic Says It Blocked Possible Efforts to Build Biological Weapons”? Here’s more info about what they were trying to do. As the article notes, it’s difficult to differentiate legitimate research from research that could help develop biological weapons.
Lawyers Are Even More Miserable Than We Knew: On Above the Law, Staci Zaretsky cites a study which surveyed more than 37,000 lawyers and found that nearly 22% reported moderate to severe symptoms of depression, while more than 20% reported moderate to severe anxiety, and nearly 19% reported moderate to severe stress. More than 41% said their time in the legal profession had been “detrimental” to their mental health. Honestly, I’m surprised it’s not worse.
Unsupervised Self Collection—The Fox Guarding the Chicken Coop—Leads to Discovery on Discovery: Michael Berman covers this harassment case on the EDRM blog where defendant “Abdullah Yassin admitted that he failed to preserve ESI and failed to review his own the electronic devices, including email and texts, or those of Khalid Yassin, the alleged harasser. Further, he had not directed any of his employees to do so.” In short, this is why counsel needs to manage the collection process.
Aldi Responds To Complaint With AI Prompt: An Aldi customer who complained about a defective food product said she received what appeared to be an AI prompt someone had written to generate a customer-service response, but not the response itself. Having the human in the loop doesn’t guarantee success if the human gets careless about what they’re doing.
Mark Zuckerberg Takes Aim at Anthropic in Debate Over A.I. Slowdown: In a social media post, Zuckerberg said that leading AI labs should be focused on safety rather than improving their own technology and that calls to pause AI development industrywide were the wrong approach. Given how far behind Meta is in the AI race, I would tend to believe that Meta is focused more on safety rather than improving their own technology. Then again, their automated AI moderation systems improperly deleted thousands of accounts (after they laid off 8,000 people, including most of the AI moderation team).
Boston dumps Flock, says it shared data nationwide in violation of contract: Well now, how are they going to be able to tell the person who actually did “pahk the cahh”? 😉 Seriously though, they reportedly did so after the company shared data nationwide in violation of a contract provision. With all the stories of misuse of the their license plate reader cameras, they really did “Flock” up their implementation.
Why legal tech leaders are unfazed by the “AI WILL KILL US ALL!” kerfuffle, and calls for AI regulation: Casey Newton and Alexander Dumont of Project Counsel Media report feedback from “a top-table event for corporate counsel exploring advanced developments in AI for in-house counsel”. They say the “kerfuffle” won’t impact legal and I agree. Still, I found what one attendee said telling: “We are all about, only about the money. Not chasing artificial general intelligence. Legal tech focuses on solving discrete, highly specific workflow problems. It’s why, for the most part ,we don’t even care about the disintegration of the U.S. justice system. We do corporate, we do business, we do money”. Says a lot about the corporate mentality.
‘The days of throw the latest and newest at every problem are over’: Legal AI’s shift to consumption-based pricing: By 2028, more than 35% of company legal departments’ new spending on legal tech will be tied to their consumption of AI, research company Gartner has predicted. Legora has already announced “consumption based” pricing and others are expected to follow. We’re not talking about this enough.
Clients Don’t Care About Your Law Firm Org Chart: Good article about taking ownership of the client experience and the pitfalls of having people from different departments work with the client in different ways. They prefer a “go to” person to coordinate client response.
Zuckerberg, Musk and Jensen reportedly convinced Trump to block AI regulator: Zuckerberg isn’t just talking about no need for AI regulation – he’s doing something about it. So is Elon and Nvidia’s Huang. Sigh.
More on “Bulldog Law”: Hey Bulldog! Michael Berman covers this case on the EDRM blog involving two firms fighting over the ability to be known as “the bulldog lawyers”. Apparently, the “bulldog” defendants have left a big mess in discovery for the court to clean up, which it did in the form of significant sanctions. That’s “ruff”! 🤣
Hope you enjoyed the kitchen sink for September 18, 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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