Hunton Retail Law Resource

On April 1, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held that the 2024 amendment to Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act, limiting damages, applies retroactively to pending cases.

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.

The Federal Trade Commission has issued a new Policy Statement encouraging the adoption of robust age‑verification technologies by pledging not to bring enforcement actions under the COPPA Rule against operators of general‑ or mixed‑audience sites that collect, use or disclose personal information solely to determine users’ ages, so long as long as they follow strict safeguards.

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.