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July 30, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO — Partly reviving the suit of a pro se scientist, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals issued an unpublished memorandum disposition reversing summary judgment against him as to claims concerning a pension plan; however, the appellate court also upheld denial of the scientist’s motions for discovery sanctions and affirmed that he had waived his claims concerning a 401(k) plan and retaliation in exchange for a $12,500 severance payment.
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July 30, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals denied without explanation Microsoft Corp.’s petition for panel rehearing or rehearing en banc, leaving in place a panel’s March reversal of a Texas federal judge’s decision to exclude a plaintiff technology company’s expert on damages and vacatur of the judge’s grant of summary judgment for absence of remedy in Microsoft’s favor on infringement claims involving patents describing a method for communication between virtual networks.
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July 30, 2026
MINNEAPOLIS — In a relator’s qui tam suit alleging violations of the False Claims Act (FCA) and related Minnesota law, a Minnesota federal magistrate judge denied portions of the relator’s second motion to compel seeking to expand the temporal and substantive scope of discovery as lacking relevance but took under advisement requests for production related to audits of claims to government payers, pending a supplemental declaration identifying dates of the audit.
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July 30, 2026
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Anthropic PBC must preserve more than 500 million individual Claude prompts and outputs, with half of the randomly selected records coming from before Jan. 28, and the other 250 million from between that date and March 24, as well as any records from that time frame containing certain terms relevant to the copyright battle over artificial intelligence song lyrics, a federal judge in California said.
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July 30, 2026
NEW ORLEANS — Affirming quashal of a subpoena for foreign discovery and rejecting arguments that the lower court made procedural and substantive errors, the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals said in an unpublished opinion that “the district court provided adequate reasoning” and “did not abuse its discretion in determining that the” four factors outlined in Intel Corp. v. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. favored the appellee.
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July 30, 2026
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — An order denying certification of a direct appeal to a circuit court does not short-circuit an attempt to appeal a privilege ruling to a district court and actually reinforces the need for such an appeal, DBMP LLC and related entities tell a federal judge in North Carolina in response to a notice of supplemental authority by the claimants.
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July 29, 2026
NEW YORK — A New York federal judge denied an anonymous website operator’s motion to quash a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) subpoena seeking identifying information from an internet services company, finding that the copyright holder presented a concrete infringement claim and sought information necessary to identify and sue the operator.
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July 29, 2026
As the legal world continues to grapple with the impact of artificial intelligence on various aspects of its work, a mix of state and federal courts recently addressed whether prompts created in anticipation of litigation are discoverable and the acceptable use of the technology to cull documents from potentially responsive discovery.
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July 27, 2026
DENVER — Resolving two motions filed by a physician who is challenging denial of her claim for long-term disability (LTD) benefits, a Colorado federal magistrate judge allowed her to amend the complaint to seek exemplary damages but ordered her to respond to interrogatories concerning “the impressions or opinions of her former coworkers.”
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July 24, 2026
FORT WORTH, Texas — A Texas federal judge on July 23 granted in part and denied in part motions to compel discovery by a nonprofit organization in X Corp.’s suit asserting that the nonprofit wrote articles “disparaging X Corp.” by accusing X Corp. of placing advertisements on its platform near “neo-Nazi or other extremist content,” finding that while X Corp. must produce formerly public posts that it deleted, it need not produce public posts that users voluntarily deleted.
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July 24, 2026
DENVER — An insured’s motion for leave to file an amended complaint to add an additional bad faith claim, a request for punitive damages and a claim for violation of the Colorado Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) should be denied because the additional claims proposed by the insured, which is seeking coverage for damage to its rental unit, are futile, a Colorado federal magistrate judge recommended.
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July 23, 2026
LOS ANGELES — After Cox Commc'ns, Inc. v. Sony Music Ent., movie and television production companies’ contributory copyright infringement claim is doomed because there is no evidence that Midjourney Inc. displayed copyrighted material or encouraged users to produce it, the artificial intelligence image company says in a motion for partial judgment on the pleadings. Meanwhile, the parties wrapped briefing on Midjourney’s attempt to have a judge take a second look at a ruling limiting discovery into the plaintiffs’ consumer-facing AI uses.
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July 21, 2026
PHILADELPHIA — Three litigation funders filed a motion on July 20 asking the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to stay their appeal challenging a federal judge’s denial of their motion to compel arbitration of a discovery dispute with a German claims administrator, writing that their separate, pending petition for a writ of certiorari arising out of a separate case between the same parties “bears directly on this case.”
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July 21, 2026
DALLAS — A Texas federal judge granted a motion by a part owner of a company that operates laboratories and pharmacies to withdraw his assertion of his Fifth Amendment rights and reopen his deposition in a suit by health insurers alleging that the man and others participated in a fraudulent Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) referral scheme, finding that after balancing the parties’ interests, discovery should be reopened for the purpose of allowing the owner to serve amended responses to interrogatories.
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July 17, 2026
PHILADELPHIA — Ruling that neither the district court nor a state court has jurisdiction to enforce a subpoena against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency because sovereign immunity had not been waived, a Pennsylvania federal judge refused to compel the EPA to respond to document requests made in a lawsuit over alleged injury from exposure to ethylene oxide (EtO), and the judge remanded the case to state court for further proceedings.
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July 17, 2026
NEWARK, N.J. — A nonparty who purchased life insurance policies from plaintiff Columbus Life Insurance Co. filed a motion in New Jersey federal court to quash subpoenas issued by the insurer for the nonparty’s bank records and personal records in a suit alleging violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), fraud, tortious interference and unjust enrichment, arguing that the subpoenas “are overbroad, impose undue burdens, and seek highly sensitive financial information.”
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July 16, 2026
NEW YORK — Declining to compel discovery outside the administrative record in a suit challenging denial of long-term disability (LTD) benefits for an attorney diagnosed with long COVID, a New York federal judge concluded that the attorney “has not shown how his requests are relevant and, if relevant, anything other than disproportionate to the needs of the case.”
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July 16, 2026
NEW YORK — For two years, OpenAI entities misled plaintiffs and the court about the ability to search training data and ChatGPT outputs for plaintiffs’ copyrighted material and destroyed other evidence, the reality of which came to light only during a court-ordered second deposition of the defendants’ corporate representative, news plaintiffs say in asking the federal judge in New York overseeing multidistrict copyright litigation to impose sanctions.
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July 14, 2026
LOS ANGELES — Because an oil and gas company shows at most that genetic mutations might make an individual more susceptible to cancers such as mesothelioma, it has not overcome the plaintiffs’ strong privacy interests, a California judge said in denying a motion to compel additional genetic testing.
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July 14, 2026
DENVER — Following in camera review of a “Good Faith” training presentation created by an auto insurer’s in-house legal department, a Colorado federal magistrate judge ruled that attorney-client privilege applies and the insurer had not waived that privilege by any unjustified delay or by putting the presentation’s contents at issue when asserting defenses in the suit for underinsured motorist coverage.
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July 14, 2026
SALEM, Ore. — Issuing a unanimous opinion dismissing an alternative writ of mandamus in a case concerning whether the state of Oregon can “charge criminal defendants for copies of discovery materials,” the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that an amendment to the state’s discovery statute did not apply because the alleged crimes predated that amendment.
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July 14, 2026
PIERRE, S.D. — Affirming two rulings in a civil suit involving a family’s limited partnership under South Dakota law, the state Supreme Court explained that due to “the severity and bad faith violation of the solemn authority granted to an attorney” regarding subpoenas, it found no abuse of discretion in the trial court’s dismissal of the case and denial of a motion to reconsider that dismissal.
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July 13, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Following an audit prompted by allegations involving Employee Retirement Income Security Act class action litigation, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) released a public report finding that the agency “did not establish sufficient controls for how it shared confidential information using common interest agreements with non-governmental entities.”
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July 13, 2026
DENVER — Issuing an unpublished order and judgment affirming the exclusion of an expert witness in a medical malpractice case as a sanction for discovery violations, refusal to allow untimely substitution of that expert and the resulting grant of summary judgment for the defendants, the 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals said in part that the trial court had “ample reason to conclude Plaintiffs’ missteps actually interfered with the judicial process.”
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July 10, 2026
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — Issuing a memorandum and opinion denying a search warrant application in which the government sought permission to use a canvassing cell-site simulator (CCSS), an Ohio federal magistrate judge found that “the proposed CCSS does not satisfy the particularity requirement of the Fourth Amendment nor the prohibition against overbroad warrants.”