AI has made the news harder to stay ahead of. A ruling posted in the morning is rewritten across dozens of sites by noon and buried by the next day. One story runs under a dozen headlines, and the rulings and settlements that matter get lost among the copies.
I built Mass Tort Wire for my own desk to keep up with that pace. Each time it opens, it gathers the news on the litigations I follow and the firms I watch, folds the rewrites of a story into one item, and sets aside the stories that would waste the morning. This fall I am setting up copies for a small number of plaintiff firms, policyholder-side teams, and the companies that serve them.
What it watches
Your litigations. Each tracked litigation runs its own news search over the window you choose, and again over the last 24 hours, so a busy docket still surfaces yesterday’s ruling. A litigation carries the other names the press uses for it: talc also catches “baby powder,” and asbestos also catches “mesothelioma.”
The firms you watch. Each firm name runs its own search for verdicts, filings, leadership appointments, sponsorships and deals. A firm’s own blog can feed the wire directly, and when the firm’s post and the press story about it cover the same event, the two appear as one item.
The trade and legal press. Reuters and Law360 run on every copy. The update pages on Lawsuit Informer and the analysis on Lawsuit Intelligencer arrive the day they publish.
What it sets aside
The filters come from reading the raw feed every day and blocking whatever wasted the morning. Stock-picking publishers, price-move headlines and investor-alert press releases about defendants stay off the wire. A documentary about the 1982 Tylenol poisonings stays out of the Tylenol litigation. A car model or a hockey player who shares a firm’s name stays out of that firm’s news. A search result that names none of your litigations or firms, and reads as general news, goes behind an OFF-TOPIC line at the top of the feed. One tap lists those stories at the end of the feed, so a story the filters set aside is always one tap away.
How it reads
The wire runs in a phone or desktop browser and installs to a home screen like an app. It scans when opened, groups stories by day, and marks a story NEW for 24 hours after it arrives. A revised update page counts as new again, so a ruling added to a page you already read gets its own flag.
Two tabs sort the feed. News Wire carries everything. AI Wire follows AI in the courts and in legal work, and can carry the AI safety and policy news that tends to reach the courts next: training pauses, kill switches, Senate probes. The AI Wire shows one copy of each story and folds the rewrites that follow over the next three days into it. A third tab holds whichever desk a firm runs. A firm that tracks law firm investment, MSO or funding topics gets Deal Wire there. A policyholder-side team gets Risk Wire, for coverage litigation and the exposures that drive it.
Four starting desks
Litigation desk. The active consumer mass torts and the national plaintiff firms, for a firm that signs cases.
Deal desk, buyer. MSO and private equity news, the platforms doing deals, and the docket events that price an inventory: bellwether results, Daubert rulings, settlement programs.
Deal desk, seller. The same deal coverage, plus the state rules on nonlawyer ownership and fee sharing, and the firms that have already taken investment.
Risk desk. Coverage litigation read from the policyholder’s side. Denials and bad faith verdicts, the exclusions carriers are writing into D&O and technology errors and omissions policies, allocation and exhaustion fights in long-tail exposures, and the recalls and enforcement actions that become coverage disputes before they become settlements.
Every desk is a starting point. A firm adds its own litigations and firms on top, and I adjust any copy the same day a firm asks.
Terms of the pilot
A copy is free. It lives at its own address with the firm’s name at the top. The firm gets a read-only key to share across its team, and I keep the key that edits the copy, so a forwarded key can read the wire and cannot change it. The firm’s topic list stays in that copy and is never shared with another firm.
The wire counts opens, scans and story clicks so I can see whether it earns its place on a firm’s screen. It records nothing else. It may carry one sponsor line later, from a company that serves the plaintiff bar. A law firm will never be a sponsor.