This week’s kitchen sink for October 23, 2026 (with meme from Gates Dogfish) discusses how timing is everything in discovery, Meta’s $25 billion bill & 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! Nobody wants this…except producing parties! 🤣
Here is the kitchen sink for October 23 of ten-ish stories that I didn’t get to this week, with a comment from me about each:
We’re up to 2,207(!) AI hallucination cases and counting. That’s an increase of “only” 8 cases this week – the first single digit week in a long time!
Want to use AI to improve your work? Have it disagree with you: I can’t argue with that! 😉 Seriously though, this author says that when knowledge workers intentionally use AI to challenge their ideas – to generate friction – they can significantly improve their performance. Makes sense to me.
Anthropic gives outside AI watchdog “employee-like” access: Anthropic has granted external evaluators “employee-like access” to assess the risks of its models, following through on a commitment to increase safeguards over concerns the technology could run catastrophically out of control. METR, a nonprofit that has worked with leading labs including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta, now has a team embedded in the Claude maker’s office with access to its hardware and internal systems. Seems like a really good idea to me.
Schrödinger’s Cat Goes to Court, Part One and Part Two: Ralph Losey is back at it with another multiple part series – this time, he published both parts on back-to-back days. In part one, Ralph uses Schrödinger’s Cat and the history of quantum physics to explain superposition, entanglement, measurement, and quantum computing for lawyers (What, like it’s hard? 😉). In part two, he explores two consequences: protecting confidential information against future quantum decryption and evaluating quantum-generated evidence. Guaranteed to make you smarter.
The Discovery Timing Trap: What FTC v. Uber Teaches About Getting Structured Data Late in Discovery: Kelly Twigger discusses this case about transaction-level data the FTC wanted from Uber. The data was relevant, yet, the Court denied the motion to compel. Read it to find out why.
Five Things to Check Before You Rely on Anything AI Hands You: Terrific article for lawyers, identifying five critical checks to verify AI output, by Samir Ali on Attorney at Work. If all lawyers did this, we wouldn’t have any more lawyer entries on Damien’s database.
Meta Ordered to Pay $25 Billion for Deceiving Users on Privacy: Even for Meta, this is serious money. It stemmed from a lawsuit by the state of New Mexico claiming the social media company had misled users about their data privacy in the Cambridge Analytica fiasco. I’m shocked. 😏
Should Legal Tech Vendors Fear Microsoft’s Copilot for Legal?: Yes. Oh, you want elaboration? 😉 It’s because, unlike Anthropic and OpenAI, Microsoft tools have been embedded in the daily working routines of many lawyers for years. Happy now? 🤣
After the ConnectWise breach, a firm’s GDPR clock may start before its Microsoft 365 logs can answer: Rob Robinson warns that a firm’s breach-notification obligations may arise before it can fully reconstruct an attack – and critical logs to do so may already have expired. Log retention and incident documentation are key to a firm’s ability to explain and defend its response.
Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts.: This may be the scariest “AI going rogue” story yet. 😟 Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions. Katherine D’Amato discusses it in Project Counsel Media.
Improper Reliance on A.I. + Failure to Use Litigation Support Experts + Lack of Transparency = Failure to Comply With “Meet & Confer” Order: Michael Berman provides some “lawyer math” in covering this case on the EDRM blog where the court had to order a “do over” with a neutral expert when they did the three things in Mike’s equation above. BTW, ICYMI, here’s the case that Mike and I covered earlier this week – our first ever collaboration! YW. 😉
An AI agent can write the story, but EU law asks whether a human reviewed it: Those pesky Europeans! 😉 Rob Robinson discusses the difference between totally AI automated newsrooms (with no review) and publishers that verify and approve AI drafts. As Rob notes: “Under Article 50(4) of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, holding editorial responsibility for AI-generated news text does not by itself exempt it from labeling. The text must also have undergone human review or editorial control, which nonbinding Commission guidelines published July 20 say must be substantive rather than a cursory sign-off.” Of course, the code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules. 🤣
Hope you enjoyed the kitchen sink for October 23, 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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