This week’s kitchen sink for October 30, 2026 (with meme from Gates Dogfish) discusses Weil’s impending demise, AI attacking mosquitoes & 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! Well, if not, you can see everything! 🤣

Here is the kitchen sink for October 30 of ten-ish stories that I didn’t get to this week, with a comment from me about each:

We’re up to 2,241(!) AI hallucination cases and counting. That’s an increase of 33 cases this week – back to a normal cadence. Sigh.

The Age Of The Orchestrator Arrives As AI Tokengeddon Looms: In Above the Law, Joe Patrice provides a couple of nice analogies that illustrate the Model Context Protocol (MCP) concept that many legal tech providers are embracing: 1) “Roku replacing a user’s Disney+ search” (when you want to find a TV show, but don’t know what network it’s on, and 2) “a separate AI system to act as a point guard that evaluates the request and distributes the work to the appropriate model at every step of the process”. Good article.

Weil leadership tells partners firm should be dissolved: Speaking of Joe, he was the person (at the Everlaw conference) that informed me that Weil, Gotshal & Manges is officially (and shockingly) done after 95 years. Illustrates just how much of a house of cards even very large firms can be when top partners leave and take their business with them. Roughly 1,200 lawyers and 1,000 non-lawyer staff will be looking for work. Sad.

Hypersensitivity or hypervigilance? Reading the signals in email’s To, Cc and Bcc lines: This just in: emails still matter. 😉 Rob Robinson discusses how email’s To, Cc and Bcc fields communicate authority, responsibility and inclusion – which can impact people in an organization psychologically (e.g., copying a person’s supervisor on an email to them) and helping to reconstruct organizational relationships and who knew what for eDiscovery professionals.

Clio Says AI Is Boosting Billable Hours: Maybe I Was Wrong. Or Maybe Not.: A week after Everlaw’s report said that AI is leading to the diminishment of billable hours, Clio said that AI is boosting billable hours. Stephen Embry analyzes the meaning of Clio’s report in his article here in Above the Law. I plan to do a deeper dive comparing the two reports next week.

Lessons from Law School: Negotiating to Understand the Rule 26(f) Conference: Speaking of deeper dives, my segues are really great this week! 🤣 Professor Bill Hamilton’s latest post on the ACEDS blog about eDiscovery best practices is a deep dive into understanding best practices for the Rule 26(f) conference (i.e., the “meet and confer”). Really enjoying this series!

An ESI Protocol is Not a Shield Against Discovery Obligations – Is There a Duty to “Fess Up?” – Part III: Michael Berman discusses this case on the EDRM blog where the plaintiff only searched for emails that contained the defendant’s seven provided search terms. That wasn’t good enough for the court. Mike also provides a clause that would likely have avoided the dispute.

CrowdStrike: “Law firm cyber hacks are spiking and there is no end in sight”: As Casey De Monte reports in Project Counsel Media, CrowdStrike’s report shows that cyberattacks targeting law firms and legal industry organizations have doubled since 2023 and that law firms faced a 129% increase in malicious activity over the first 8 months of the year compared to all of 2024. Ruh-roh!

Reset, shift or maturation: what 2026’s 16 eDiscovery deals suggest so far: Rob Robinson continues to track eDiscovery mergers, acquisitions and investments and has been doing so since 2001(!). Here, he breaks down the 16 deals so far this year, which is another year where we’re not seeing many deals happen. So much for consolidation.

Court Denies Motion to Prohibit Use of GenAI by Opponents: As Michael Berman discusses in the EDRM blog, the court (rightly, IMO) rejected Defendants’ Joint Motion for an Order Prohibiting the Use of Generative AI in court submissions because Plaintiffs’ submissions “bear the hallmark content of AI-generated material”. What matters is the quality of the submissions, not the approach. That’s what FRCP Rule 11 is supposed to help ensure.

Why eDiscovery Skills Matter in Financial Fraud Investigations: Maribel Rivera provides a terrific recap on the ACEDS blog of a session she moderated at RelFest Chicago. Great topic and discussion.

In China, the War on Mosquitoes Has Entered the A.I. Era: Did Dr. Evil think this up? A company in China has invented a $1,000 A.I.-enabled brick that tracks mosquitoes in flight and burns their wings off with a laser. Keith Bradsher of The New York Times got a demo of it. Hey, what could possibly go wrong here? 🤣

Hope you enjoyed the kitchen sink for October 30, 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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