Lawsuit Intelligencer Vol. I · No. 6 · October 2026

Lawsuit Intelligencer

Attorney-led analysis of mass torts, product liability, toxic exposure litigation, and the business of plaintiff-side law.

Archive

Every Article, by Month

The full run of the publication, newest first. The home page carries the ten most recent pieces. Everything published since the first issue in May 2026 is here, with the beat and reading time for each.

Edited by David Meldofsky

October 2026

  1. The Social Media Platforms' Insurers Are Making the Plaintiffs' Case

    To walk away from the social media addiction cases, Meta’s and Google’s liability insurers have to argue two things. The platforms were designed on purpose, and the harm to children was foreseeable. That is the plaintiffs’ theory of the case, argued by the defendants’ own carriers. A Delaware court accepted it in February, and the plaintiffs lost the insurance money in the same ruling.

    · Analysis · Insurance Coverage · 12 min read

  2. Who Reports Ozempic and GLP-1 Gastroparesis to the FDA

    The FDA’s adverse event database holds 5,699 reports tying gastroparesis to Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs. Lawyers filed one in five of them, and 87% arrived after the MDL formed.

    · Analysis · Mass Tort Economics · 9 min read

September 2026

  1. The Preparation Does Much of the Negotiating

    Elliott Portnoy now advises private equity sponsors on law firm MSO transactions. He explains why the plaintiff-side deals that close at higher multiples were mostly won a year before the first sponsor meeting.

    · Interview · The Business of Plaintiff-Side Law · 5 min read

  2. Cross-Examined by Your Own Chat Log

    Two federal courts divided in February over whether a party’s AI conversations are discoverable, and both were arguing about chats made for the case. In a mass tort the dangerous material sits years earlier, in a timestamped conversation the plaintiff has forgotten writing.

    · Analysis · Evidence and Discovery · 11 min read

  3. Courts Are Writing the AI Rules. They Won’t Let AI in the Room.

    A prospective juror researched a pending Georgia murder case and told the rest of the pool what he found, and the discharged panel cost the court $4,762.43. The same courts now deciding what AI companies owe the public forbid the technology in their own deliberations.

    · Analysis · Courts and Artificial Intelligence · 8 min read

  4. The Expert Has to Be Right the Same Way, Forty Times

    Josh Hyatt of Expert Institute on why a prior transcript sinks more experts than a thin CV does. A bellwether program demands something of a witness that a single case never will.

    · Interview · The Business of Plaintiff-Side Law · 6 min read

  5. Arizona v. L'Oréal Moves the Hair Relaxer Fight to Disclosure

    Arizona sued L'Oréal under a consumer fraud statute that needs no injured consumer. The case sits in Maricopa County while 11,779 federal cases wait on a causation ruling, and it asks what the company told buyers.

    · Analysis · Mass Tort Economics · 7 min read

  6. What Plaintiff Firms Get Wrong When They Buy Claimant Acquisition

    Brian Beck of Typhon Interactive puts numbers on the difference between a firm that works its leads and one that doesn’t. Mass arbitration, he says, is a technology problem before it is a media problem.

    · Interview · The Business of Plaintiff-Side Law · 7 min read

August 2026

  1. The ChatGPT Log You Can’t Subpoena: Preserving Chat Evidence in AI Injury Litigation

    The Stored Communications Act blocks the third-party subpoena most practitioners reach for, and the order that suspended routine deletion terminated in September 2025. In the AI injury docket, the evidence case is won or lost in the first week of intake.

    · Analysis · Evidence and Discovery · 14 min read

  2. 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.

    · Coverage · AI Liability · 8 min read

  3. 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. What it actually tests is not the epidemiology but whether a better warning would have changed how one NICU fed one infant.

    · Coverage · Product Liability · 7 min read

  4. 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.

    · Analysis · Coordinated Proceedings · 8 min read

  5. 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.

    · Analysis · The Business of Plaintiff-Side Law · 5 min read

July 2026

  1. 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.

    · Analysis · Mass Torts & MDL Practice · 5 min read

  2. 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.

    · Coverage · Food Safety Litigation · 6 min read

  3. AI Due-Diligence Queries Are Reading Your Firm

    Search Console data across an attorney-run legal publishing network keeps surfacing templated, machine-built queries that scan companies for litigation exposure and legal brands for legitimacy. The assistants are checking references before they cite, and most firms have no page that answers.

    · Analysis · Search & AI · 5 min read

  4. 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. The Acetaminophen MDL is the cautionary tale everyone in the room remembers.

    · Analysis · Mass Tort Economics · 6 min read

June 2026

  1. 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.

    · Analysis · AI & Export Controls · 8 min read

  2. 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.

    · Analysis · Product Liability & Platform Immunity · 9 min read

  3. 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. What reprices it arrives in the second half of 2026.

    · Analysis · The Business of Plaintiff-Side Law · 10 min read

  4. 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. The plant already faces a Clean Air Act citizen suit, a pending preliminary injunction, and possible DOJ intervention. The physical-externalities half of the AI docket has arrived.

    · Coverage · AI Infrastructure Litigation · 7 min read

May 2026

  1. 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.

    · Analysis · Regulation & Legal Ethics · 7 min read

  2. 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.

    · Analysis · Professional Responsibility · 9 min read

  3. 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, and EPA’s 2025–2026 rollback collapsed that assumption. What changes for plaintiff lawyers when the federal anchor moves and the state floors don’t.

    · Analysis · Regulation · 8 min read

  4. 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.

    · Analysis · The Business of Plaintiff-Side Law · 10 min read

  5. Welcome to Lawsuit Intelligencer

    What this publication is, what it isn't, and why it exists.

    · Editor's Note · 3 min read