Lawsuit Intelligencer covers the lawsuits, regulations, referral systems, legal marketing practices, and technologies reshaping modern litigation — the questions that don't fit in consumer legal media or law firm marketing.
Featured Analysis
The 2026 Mass Tort Map
The federal docket has never been more concentrated, and 2026 is the year the procedural phase finally turned into verdicts. Two of the defense bar's most dependable shields are cracking at the same time: Section 230 and bankruptcy.
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The AI Tort That Skips the Output Question
Judge Lee held that Otter.ai is a third-party eavesdropper under CIPA not because the notetaker was uninvited, but because it trains on what it records. The theory reaches an AI company's balance sheet without anyone having to answer the product-or-content question first.
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MDL 3026 Finally Has a Jury in the NEC Docket
Three federal bellwethers never reached a jury. The fourth is being tried in Chicago now, and what it actually tests is not the epidemiology but whether a better warning would have changed how one NICU fed one infant.
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The Handwritten Line in the ChatGPT Leadership Order
CMO No. 1 in the coordinated ChatGPT product liability cases appoints the usual leadership and bars everyone else from filing on liability. Then the judge added a line by hand preserving a self-represented plaintiff's right to be heard. The mechanics are worth reading closely.
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The Case You Can’t Serve
A Senate bill would create a contingent-fee action against the President, his family, and federal contractors. Then it names an intervenor that does not exist.
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The Docket the Panel Wouldn't Build
Twice denied an MDL, the video game addiction litigation re-formed around a California coordination, scattered federal filings, and, since March, school districts. For plaintiff firms, the structure is now the story.
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ByHeart's Five-Month Sprint to MDL 3178
A November recall became a centralized federal docket by April — one of the fastest recall-to-MDL runs in recent memory. The hybrid structure, the single-defendant economics, and the first outbreak of its kind make this a different underwriting problem than the latency torts.
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AI Due-Diligence Queries Are Reading Your Firm
Search Console data across an attorney-run legal publishing network keeps surfacing the same thing: templated, machine-built queries scanning companies for litigation exposure and scanning legal brands for legitimacy. The assistants are checking references before they cite. Most firms have no page that answers.
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Hair Relaxer's Daubert Gate and Intake Economics
Eleven and a half thousand cases are waiting on one admissibility ruling. The general-causation Daubert fight in MDL 3060 is the binary event that reprices every hair relaxer inventory in the country — and the Acetaminophen MDL is the cautionary tale everyone in the room remembers.
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The Startup Suing Washington Over an AI Kill Switch
A San Jose legal-tech startup is suing the federal government to reverse the export-control order that switched off Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5. A plain-language guide to the claims, the government's likely defenses, and the first real test of whether Washington can disable a frontier AI model already in use.
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The Conduit Defense Meets a Sovereign: Fable 5, Garcia, and Section 230
An export-control directive pulled Claude Fable 5 offline as a controlled capability, not protected speech. What the takedown, the Garcia product ruling, and Anthropic's own call for FAA-style regulation mean for the product-or-content question and the Section 230 defense.
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The Inventory Nobody Knows How to Price: Inside the AI Wrongful Death Docket
Four case fronts in ten months, all pretrial, and a filing pace that keeps accelerating. How plaintiff firms are building inventory against a docket with no settlement history, no merits ruling, and no consolidation — and what reprices it in the second half of 2026.
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The First AI Infrastructure Class Action: 10,000 Mississippi Residents Take On xAI's Colossus Gas Plant
A nuisance suit filed this week opens a second litigation front against the same Southaven facility already facing a Clean Air Act citizen suit, a pending preliminary injunction, and possible DOJ intervention. The physical-externalities half of the AI docket has arrived.
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The Fee That Isn’t a Fee
Private equity’s path into personal injury law rests on a single undefined word. California and Illinois wrote it into their statutes without saying what it means — and no court has decided where a management fee ends and “indirect” fee-sharing begins.
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Federal PFAS Rules Are Contracting. State PFAS Rules Aren't. The Litigation Will Follow the States.
The 2024 EPA drinking water standards looked like a foundation for the next wave of PFAS litigation. EPA's 2025–2026 rollback collapsed that assumption. What changes for plaintiff lawyers when the federal anchor moves and the state floors don't.
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AI Can Write the Brief. You Still Have to Verify It.
The sanctions docket is now its own body of law, and almost every entry failed at the same step. A working guide to using generative AI in court filings without ending up in a show-cause order.
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Mass Tort Intake Is About to Get Reshaped — Not by the FCC, but by Plaintiffs' Lawyers
The Eleventh Circuit's 2025 vacatur of the one-to-one consent rule is being misread as a regulatory all-clear. The actual pressure has just shifted to TCPA class actions and state bar enforcement.
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Welcome to Lawsuit Intelligencer
What this publication is, what it isn't, and why it exists.
From the Editor, Published Elsewhere
Law360 · Expert Analysis
Is AI Output a Product or Content?
The central doctrinal question now surfacing across the OpenAI docket and the broader wave of AI injury litigation: when a generative system produces an output that contributes to harm, is that output a product subject to liability, or is it content? Editor David Meldofsky's Law360 Expert Analysis, free to read.
Read the full analysis →What We Cover
Mass Torts & Product Liability
PFAS, AFFF, talc, pharmaceutical and medical device litigation, MDL practice, and the doctrines moving through them.
The Business of Plaintiff-Side Law
Intake, referral economics, lead generation, legal marketing, AI in legal practice, firm consolidation, and the regulatory environment around all of it.
Regulation That Moves Litigation
Federal and state agency action — EPA, FDA, FCC, state AGs, state bars — analyzed for what it means in court, not what the press release said.