Writing on Citational

Aramark v CMA - How Lawgame Found a Ground of Appeal That a KC Missed

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Tl;dr

A top-tier legal team missed a filing deadline by 19 hours. Their client lost the right to challenge a forced sale of its business. We fed the case into Lawgame’s Innovation Lab and it identified a compelling ground of appeal hiding in plain sight: the Tribunal had applied a binding precedent while ignoring the very thing that made it binding — its ratio. The Tribunal’s own factual findings contradicted its legal conclusion

The privilege trap in legal AI, and how we avoid it

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

U.S. v. Heppner, SDNY, and the question most legal AI companies never thought to ask

12 February 2026

A motion filed on February 6, 2026 in the Southern District of New York should be required reading for every lawyer using commercial AI. It will also, I suspect, be ignored by most of the companies building legal AI tools.

In United States v. Bradley Heppner (1:25-cr-00503-JSR), the U.S. Attorney’s office moved for a ruling that 31 documents the defendant created using Anthropic’s Claude public-facing chatbot are not privileged read the motion here. The Government’s reasoning is direct, and on the law, almost certainly correct. The defendant used a commercial chatbot to query legal issues related to the government’s investigation of him, then shared those documents with his lawyers and claimed privilege.

Lexos v. Overstock: Five Lawyers, Zero Verification

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The “Human in the Loop” Is a Myth

February 2026

On February 2, Judge Julie A. Robinson of the District of Kansas sanctioned five attorneys for filing a brief containing hallucinated case law. The incident went viral immediately. Not because a lawyer used ChatGPT - we have seen that before - but because of the sheer scale of the failure. Lead counsel, senior partner, managing partner, associate, local counsel; five pairs of eyes all missed the problem.

Westlaw Deep Research and the cost of category errors

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When legal AI gets the law backwards

January 2026

In November 2025, Thomson Reuters demonstrated Westlaw Deep Research AI. They asked it a straightforward evidence question: can a laboratory director’s opinion be admitted as lay testimony in the Ninth Circuit?

Westlaw cited United States v. Elizabeth Holmes, the recent Theranos fraud appeal. It answered with confidence:

No. Laboratory directors generally cannot offer lay testimony. Their specialized knowledge makes them expert witnesses under Rule 702.

The Bluebook Is a Turing Test

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a particular kind of error that reveals more than it should.

When an AI system formats a legal citation, it is not just arranging text according to rules. It is demonstrating—or failing to demonstrate—an understanding of what legal authority actually is. The Bluebook, that infamous spiral-bound monument to pedantry, turns out to be a surprisingly effective test of whether a system understands law or merely generates plausible legal-sounding text.

The Difference Between a Citation and a Verification

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Legal research has always been a verification problem masquerading as a search problem.

For decades, the technology available to lawyers optimized for search. Find the case. Locate the statute. Surface the relevant secondary source. The implicit assumption was that once you found the right authority, the hard work was done.

This assumption was always wrong, but it was a tolerable kind of wrong. When research required physically pulling reporters from shelves or carefully constructing Boolean queries, the friction itself imposed a kind of discipline. You had to read the case because you were already there, book in hand. You developed judgment about whether a holding actually supported your argument because developing that judgment was inseparable from the mechanical act of research.