A federal authority’s review of government legal work has produced a damning finding: 35 out of 42 citations in an HHS brief were fictitious, erroneous, or entirely irrelevant to the arguments made.
The Federal Labor Relations Authority’s conclusion raises urgent questions about the integrity of federal legal filings at a moment when AI-assisted drafting is becoming routine across the profession.
Meanwhile, the gap between what law firms say publicly and what they do privately was on vivid display in the Weil Gotshal saga, which unfolded over roughly a month.
The firm had stated plainly that it was “not engaged in merger discussions with any firm,” only for it to emerge shortly afterwards that it was already working through a memorandum of understanding with a potential partner.
That deal, with Willkie Farr, subsequently collapsed, leaving the firm’s earlier denial looking doubly awkward.
At Freshfields, a different kind of disclosure problem surfaced when the firm’s global managing partner accidentally forwarded an internal thread discussing a possible spin-off of the firm’s AI unit.
The episode underscored a recurring theme in legal circles: artificial intelligence keeps exposing vulnerabilities, and sometimes the vulnerability is the person at the keyboard.
Justice Elena Kagan offered a sharp institutional critique during an appearance at Catholic University’s law school, arguing that the Supreme Court “has kind of blinded itself to the very deleterious effect of their rulings” on the political system, citing partisan gerrymandering and campaign finance as examples.
On the judiciary front, Associate Attorney General Stan Woodward sought to have Judge Ana Reyes disqualified after she flagged what she described as the government blatantly violating the law, a move that drew immediate attention in Washington legal circles.
The situation intensified when the DC Preservation League informed Judge Reyes that the president had referred to her as “a crazed lunatic” in remarks made just hours before a scheduled hearing.
Supporters of former White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia have taken to citing Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris’s bar exam struggles as a defence, an argument that would carry weight only if Zacharia’s difficulties were bar-exam-related.
Yale Law School alumni Vivek Ramaswamy and JD Vance have found themselves defending a campaign advertisement featuring Amy Acton’s mother, a woman who lost custody of her children after her husband sexually abused the candidate as a child.
Rounding out a week of legal turbulence, attorneys surveyed on the four words most likely to send a chill down their spines offered candidates ranging from “Your draft didn’t save” to the quietly menacing “Per my prior correspondence.”
One law student, for his part, declared that the pressure of game day is nothing compared to the daily grind of law school, a sentiment that will surprise few who have been through it.