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Federal criminal rules experts may soon begin studying something the federal criminal system has resisted for more than 80 years: allow parties to take pretrial depositions in criminal cases. A proposal to do just that landed in front of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts’s criminal rules advisory committee last year, and now there…

Several weeks ago, this blog reported on Judge Jed Rakoff’s widely discussed “AI is not your lawyer” pronouncement in United States v. Heppner. The court’s conclusion that attorney-client privilege was waived with respect to information that a client divulged to a consumer-grade generative artificial intelligence tool – when coupled with other recent court rulings explaining…

When the ethical duty of technology competence officially arrived in 2012, courtesy of new Comment 8 to Rule 1.1 of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, the expectations were relatively modest. Much has changed since then. Technology is now deeply embedded in the legal profession, bringing both new risks and new opportunities that demand…

Judge Jed Rakoff’s recent opinion in United States v. Heppner has generated quite a bit of discussion among litigators for its conclusion, apparently a first, that divulging information to a consumer-grade generative artificial intelligence tool prevented assertion of attorney-client privilege over both the inputs to, and outputs of, the tool. The ruling may not come…

Civil litigators accustomed to treating depositions as the most expensive option in pretrial discovery may want to reconsider. In some situations, a deposition can prove less burdensome than interrogatories or document production requests — particularly when a party faces the daunting prospect of collecting, reviewing, and producing large volumes of electronically stored information. Understanding when…

One area where artificial intelligence has gained a strong foothold in litigation practice is in the preparation and cross-examination of expert witnesses. This shouldn’t be surprising. Expert opinions are frequently case-determinative in litigation. For this reason, the litigator’s role in supporting or challenging expert testimony in depositions is a “leave no stone unturned” endeavor. Enter…