Hunton Retail Law Resource

The results are in: attorneys are filing more employment law cases in court.  Indeed, year-end reporting from legal databases like LexMachina confirm that the pace of filing new employment discrimination cases reached its highest level in 2025, surpassing 20,000 new filings nationwide.  Though overtime and minimum wage lawsuits under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) have continued to decline since 2015, discrimination cases under laws like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act are on the rise.

A recent federal court decision determined that documents created by a criminal defendant using AI and subsequently shared with legal counsel were not shielded by attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine. In USA v. Heppner, Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York compelled the disclosure of 31 documents created with Anthropic’s Claude. This order was issued despite the defendant including information from counsel in the AI tool’s input and later providing the resulting outputs to his attorneys. The ruling offers early judicial perspective on privilege concerns involving AI-generated materials, an area where case law remains sparse.

A recent federal court ruling held that AI-generated documents prepared by a defendant and later shared with legal counsel were not protected by attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine.

Third-party funding of high-stakes litigation can often make the difference between litigating the case or walking away.  The financial arrangement often makes good sense, with investors helping to facilitate the pursuit of bona fide claims that might otherwise be forgone in exchange for a piece of the recovery.  Insurance coverage disputes fit this model well, since those claims typically involve an insured who has already suffered some financial or other hardship and an insurance company with deep resources that refuses to pay the claim.  It should come as little surprise, therefore, that the Insurance Services Office (ISO), an advisory and rating organization for the property/casualty insurance industry, recently approved a new endorsement that requires disclosure of third-party litigation funding agreements. The approval comes as courts and state legislatures step up demands for transparency in funding to curtail influence that funders may have over litigation strategy.