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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DENVER — Issuing an unpublished order and judgment affirming the exclusion of an expert witness in a medical malpractice case as a sanction for discovery violations, refusal to allow untimely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.”
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July 09, 2026
NEW ORLEANS — The Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals granted a petition for en banc rehearing of a case that involves discovery, vacating a 2-1 ruling; dissenting, the circuit judge who wrote that ruling noted that more than three decades have passed since the underlying murder was committed and opined that the appellate court wrongly “dithers with a routine discovery dispute in a collateral proceeding involving a draconian order, issued to a non-party, that is unreasonably burdensome and violates the work-product privilege.”
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July 09, 2026
BALTIMORE — A federal judge in Maryland denied a motion to rescind an April discovery order in a suit by a union and two groups representing a combined 7 million Americans who opposed individuals working for U.S. DOGE Service and U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization (together, DOGE) being provided access to Social Security Administration (SSA) records.
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July 07, 2026
PHILADELPHIA — The Pennsylvania federal judge overseeing the multidistrict litigation of cases alleging that the use of glucagon-like peptide-I receptor agonist (GLP-1 RA) medications caused permanent vision loss has granted the drug manufacturers’ “request for early discovery and motion practice as to the cross cutting issues of general causation and preemption/warning adequacy.”
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July 02, 2026
NEWARK, N.J. — A New Jersey federal judge found no legal basis to reverse a magistrate judge’s ruling on a discovery issue in a lawsuit stemming from claims that an improper amount of attorney fees was awarded to a law firm for its work in the Benicar multidistrict litigation.
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July 02, 2026
NEW ORLEANS — Resolving a dispute involving patent licensing agreements, foreign discovery and German and Indian law, the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals issued an unpublished opinion concluding that a lower court erred by ordering disclosure to in-house counsel for a nonparty’s competitor because the lower court wrongly overrode one clause in the agreements’ confidentiality protections.
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July 01, 2026
LOS ANGELES — Artificial intelligence video and image company Midjourney Inc. asked a federal judge in California to review a magistrate judge’s ruling limiting discovery into whether various production studios are also training artificial intelligence models on copyrighted works, saying the evidence goes to fair use and unclean hands defenses and there is no basis for a distinction between public-facing uses and internal uses.
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July 01, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Granting two separate certiorari petitions concerning geofence warrants, the U.S. Supreme Court on June 30 vacated decisions from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals and remanded for further consideration in light of the high court’s one-day-old Chatrie v. United States ruling that accessing cellphone location evidence from Google under a geofence warrant constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
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June 29, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Concluding that accessing cellphone location evidence from Google under a geofence warrant constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court on June 29 vacated and remanded part of a Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals decision in a divided ruling that left significant questions for the Fourth Circuit to address.
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June 29, 2026
MINEOLA, N.Y. — A New York justice quashed a subpoena seeking prompts, outputs and other materials related to a pro se defendant’s interactions with OpenAI OpCo LLC’s artificial intelligence, finding the material protected by litigation privilege.
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June 26, 2026
WILMINGTON, Del. — In a June 25 letter opinion in a suit that arose from a failed merger of grocery companies, a Delaware Chancery Court vice chancellor denied a motion to compel “except to the limited extent of providing guidance on the scope of” a stipulated waiver of attorney-client privilege over legal advice.
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June 25, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO — Children who were exposed to opioids in utero tell a California federal court that McKinsey & Co. “should be sanctioned with the harshest of sanctions available” for destroying “documents, cell phones, computers, and laptops, despite its knowledge that legal actions were pending against” the consulting company’s client Purdue Pharma LP, the maker of OxyContin.
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June 24, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court should deny a petition by U.S. DOGE Service (referred to as both DOGE and USDS), the DOGE acting administrator, Elon Musk and others in the federal government asking the justices to take up for the second time questions concerning discovery in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case regarding DOGE’s authority and role in mass firings in the federal government as the case does not warrant review, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) argues in its opposition brief.
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June 18, 2026
WILMINGTON, Del. — Four of five text strings between spouses who both worked at an artificial intelligence company mixed business and relationship content but focused mostly on the latter, while the fifth largely discussed work frustrations and must be produced, a vice chancellor in Delaware said in partially granting a motion to quash in a dispute between former business partners over the sale of Stability AI shares for $100.
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June 18, 2026
TACOMA, Wash. — A federal judge in Washington denied a bedding and clothing company’s motion to dismiss a putative class complaint over commercial emails that allegedly employ misleading subject lines about limited-time deals in order to create a false sense of urgency among consumers and denied as moot a motion to stay discovery pending the outcome of the motion to dismiss.
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June 16, 2026
BOSTON — A partially split First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel vacated a Puerto Rico federal judge’s grant of summary judgment in favor of the artist who performs as Ricky Martin in a sprawling copyright dispute involving a song entered into a FIFA World Cup song contest, finding that the judge took “sweeping actions” without giving the plaintiff-appellant a meaningful chance to pursue discovery.
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June 16, 2026
RICHMOND, Va. — A Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel affirmed a Virginia federal judge’s decision to exclude a plaintiff-appellant software company’s damages evidence after it repeatedly failed to meet discovery deadlines, which led to a summary judgment ruling in another software entity’s favor on copyright infringement claims.
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June 16, 2026
PHILADELPHIA — Affirming a decision not to reconsider compelling discovery responses in a divorce proceeding that concern the husband’s interest on lawyers trust account (IOLTA), the Pennsylvania Superior Court ruled in part “that the trial court properly exercised its discretion by setting forth restrictions.”
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June 16, 2026
SANTA FE, N.M. — Resolving an interlocutory question that it said presented an issue of first impression, the New Mexico Supreme Court held in part that appointment of a personal representative (PR) under New Mexico’s Wrongful Death Act (WDA) “does not involve a grant of subpoena power to a PR appointed independent of filing an actual wrongful death claim.”