ESI in the News — February 28, 2023

Welcome to ESI in the News, a new segment from eDiscovery Assistant that alerts you to happenings involving ESI. Each week’s update will include a list of what’s come up in the past week or so with updates to items as they occur to keep you informed of what’s happening in the world of ESI.

This first segment covers a few items from the past year that remain current and you’ll want to have at your fingertips as issues arise.

• Meta joins the AI race with a llama. Well, not *a* llama, but LLaMA, which stands for Large Language Model Meta AI, Meta announced yesterday. Large language models are the tech that fuels applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard. But LLaMA may be more democratized than its peers in a couple of ways: 1) Any researcher can see its inner workings, which isn’t the case for Google, OpenAI, or Bing and 2) It’s petite compared to its peers, which means it costs less to operate. Source:
• In the ongoing battle between the PGA and LIV Golf Tours, U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen denied the motions to quash subpoena requests for Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, or PIF, the sovereign wealth fund for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and for its governor, Yasir Othman Al-Rumayyan. The court has not released the decision pending redactions from the parties. We’ll update this and add the decision to eDiscovery Assistant when it is available and keep you updated on developments. Source: Law360 (subscription required).
• As Robert Freedman explains in this article, Section 230 immunity on trial as Google, Twitter go before SCOTUS this week in two separate cases that could have tremendous impact on the scope and coverage of that section of the Communications Decency Act and liability of content providers. Source: Legal Dive
• Judge suspends law license of lawyer for Alex Jones following Sandy Hook document leaks. Following the release of files that included two years of Jones’ text messages, medical records from some of the Sandy Hook families and other confidential discovery items, a Connecticut judge suspended the law license of a lawyer for right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Flatly rejecting the notion that the disclosure was “inadvertent”, the Judge wrote that “At a basic level, attorneys must competently and appropriately handle the discovery of sensitive materials in civil cases, otherwise, our civil system, in which discovery of sensitive information is customary and routine, would simply collapse.” Source: CNN
• Jerry Bui shows us a filter that’s raging on TikTok to make anyone more attractive. This is a must share with teenagers in your life, and just another example of how filters and technology can skew what we know to be true. Check this video out from Jerry, a forensics consultant and expert with FTI Consulting.

Have an item for us to include? Shoot it to us with any link at tips@ediscoveryassistant.com.