Most people delete a specific type of email without reading it. It arrives with a subject line that is just formal enough to raise suspicions, sandwiched between grocery coupons and shipping confirmations. “Notice of Proposed Class Action Settlement.” Many Dollar General customers received one of those earlier this year, and based on online chatter, an unexpected number thought it was spam and moved on. It wasn’t. The window of opportunity to take action is now closing. The case itself is straightforward, but as usual, patience is rewarded by the fine print. The discount chain was sued in New Jersey for…
Author: Janine Heller
This spring, any rural co-op in Iowa or Missouri will still have the recognizable yellow-and-green jugs stacked waist-high behind the seed corn along the back wall. Roundup is still available. Farmers continue to purchase it by the pallet. However, a settlement worth up to $7.25 billion, one of the biggest product-liability agreements in American agricultural history, is still pending approval somewhere in a St. Louis courthouse. The length of time this story has been developing is easily forgotten. When Bayer acquired Monsanto in 2018, it inherited what many analysts at the time described as a good deal. Within a year,…
When a judge discovers that a case being cited just doesn’t exist, a certain kind of silence descends upon the courtroom. No theatrical outrage, no intense legal drama. A brief pause, a thoughtful inquiry, and an exhausting afternoon for the receiving lawyer. Incompetence in the traditional sense is not the cause of the silence that has been occurring more frequently lately. It is more recent, unfamiliar, and challenging to regulate. Due to time constraints and pressure, attorneys have begun to delegate their thinking to chatbots. Silently, the issue surfaced. A solicitor here, a junior barrister there, each silently pasting questions…
The National Association of REALTORS® announced on Friday that it had agreed to pay $52.25 million to settle a homebuyer class-action lawsuit in which it was not even officially named. This announcement was buried in the type of press release that typically goes unnoticed. It’s worth stopping to consider that final detail. NAR’s decision to accept the Tuccori settlement feels more like deliberate triage than a legal retreat. There is a feeling that the trade association would prefer to write a sizable check rather than spend another ten years defending itself in front of juries after suffering two years of…
When the presenter clicked to the slide that everyone had come to see at a recent education conference in Boston, the auditorium was remarkably silent. It has a bar chart on it. Students receiving human tutoring are on one side. Conversely, students are tutored by a laptop-based AI system. The AI bar was higher. Just tall enough to cause the room’s seats to shift, not dramatic or theatrical. The study, which was published this spring, monitored about 2,000 middle school students over the course of an academic term in multiple districts. Particularly in algebra readiness and problem-solving speed, students who…
The document is brief, formal, and extremely detailed when it comes to the term “disparaging.” Buried in a settlement that a former Swalwell employee signed years ago, that one word is now accomplishing something that its drafters most likely could not have predicted. It’s dismantling a campaign. Eric Swalwell’s team had been battling internet rumors like flies at a backyard cookout for weeks. Social media creators repeatedly implied that NDAs had silenced former female employees. The campaign’s reaction was remarkably uncompromising. Key InformationDetailsSubjectRep. Eric Swalwell (D-California)RoleU.S. Congressman, 15th Congressional DistrictPolitical OfficeU.S. House of Representatives since 2013Current Campaign2026 California Gubernatorial RaceReported…
The statistics on wrongful convictions are unsettling. Ohio recently decided to spend $2.7 million on two men from the Cleveland area who were wrongfully imprisoned for years, if not decades. Until you sit with the number, it seems significant. The math becomes almost offensive when you divide it by the time that was taken, the birthdays that were missed, and the parents who were buried while the men were imprisoned. The settlement is important, though. It’s the state admitting that something went horribly wrong in the only language that governments actually speak: money. CategoryDetailsSettlement Total$2.7 million combined payout approved by…
For a longer period of time than nearly any other Republican-led state, Texas has opposed school voucher programs. Therefore, it felt like a turning point when the Texas Education Freedom Accounts program was finally passed by the legislature in 2025. a pledge of $1 billion. Suddenly, hundreds of private schools could receive public funding. Parental choice fulfilled on a large scale. The program is now facing a lawsuit that could change how states administer voucher programs nationwide before it has even started its first full school year. The lawsuit raises issues that have no clear answers. Key Information: Texas Education…
Not too long ago, a judge in a Hawaii courtroom found something that should have been impossible: citations to cases that don’t exist. The lawyer who submitted the brief placed the blame on his associate. The AI was held accountable by the associate. Additionally, the legal system exposed a fissure it hasn’t quite figured out how to close somewhere along that chain of detours. For its part, the Hawaii Supreme Court thinks it has the resources already. Rule 11 of the Hawaii Rules of Civil Procedure, which mandates that statements made to the court be truthful and permits judges to…
Filing 400 legal motions at once requires a certain level of audacity. It wasn’t the audacity of an experienced litigator sorting through a mountain of valid cases; rather, it was the audacity of someone who gave the task to a machine, pressed a button, and seemed to assume the courts wouldn’t notice. That’s essentially what happened when a paralegal flooded a court system with hundreds of concurrently filed motions using an AI tool, seemingly unaffected by the consequences. The judge responded harshly, calling this “an assault on the judicial system.” CategoryDetailsIncidentParalegal filed 400 motions simultaneously using AI-generated legal documentsCourt ResponseJudge…