• New York health regulators say Tiger Medical smuggled alloClae into the state and lied about it.
• A court filing includes photos of boxes piled in the driveway of a New Jersey nurse who regulators allege drove the product to NYC.
• Tiger says only the FDA, not New York State, can regulate alloClae, and denied wrongdoing.

On a blustery December day, nine large white cardboard boxes sat stacked next to a garbage can in the driveway of a New Jersey nurse as a man packed them into the bed of a pickup truck.

Other than a manufacturer's label in the corner and a note that the contents were perishable and shouldn't be frozen, there was no indication they held thousands of dollars' worth of processed cadaver fat. Inside the boxes, state regulators allege, was alloClae, a hot new injectable filler derived from the fat of dead people and headed to high-end cosmetic surgeon practices in New York City.

Photos of the boxes were part of a recent court filing by New York State health officials, who have accused Tiger Medical Holdings, which manufactures and sells alloClae with its affiliates, of "smuggling" the product into New York.

Tiger has said only the Food and Drug Administration has the authority to regulate alloClae, and that FDA rules don't require premarket approval. New York is one of a handful of states that issues permission to store and distribute human tissue, and it claims that Tiger violated those rules by bringing alloClae to market without waiting for approval.

Recent court filings reveal that the state obtained FedEx records, including photos, in an attempt to prove that Tiger organized a scheme to smuggle hundreds of boxes of the product — possibly over $1 million worth — into New York.

The dispute could affect the availability of a product that lets busy C-suiters get a boob job during a lunch break or a butt lift between meetings. Doctors have said the injectable is flying off the shelves, and some have continued to administer it during the state investigation.

Tiger co-CEO Oliver Burckhardt said in a filing on Wednesday that 60 doctors have contacted the company about the fat spat with New York — some worried about the case, but most wanting to buy more alloClae.

Tiger hasn't disputed shipping alloClae through New Jersey, though it has called the state's evidence "unreliable" and "self-serving," and said the allegation of "smuggling" is baseless and inflammatory.

It said the health department kept asking for more information without signaling concerns until last month, and that the company submitted testing data as recently as January to show that alloClae was safe.

Tiger's lawyer, Larry Wood Jr., did not address specific questions from Business Insider, referring a reporter to Tiger's court filings.

Building buzz for alloClae while dealing with regulators

AlloClae hit the market in 2024. It didn't take long for plastic surgeons on Manhattan's Tribeca and Upper East Side to realize the appeal. Their patients wanted a quick touch-up and were willing to pay for the convenience. In small quantities, the product can be injected for under $10,000; in other cases, it can cost up to $100,000 per procedure.

The product is a good fit for "the CEOs, COOs, CCOs that don't want to be away from the boardroom," Douglas Steinbrech, who practices in New York City, Beverly Hills, and Chicago, told Business Insider last year. "They have to go to a lot of meetings that just pop up, and they cannot control when they're going to happen. They can't just clear their schedule to recover for a surgery."

AlloClae was advertised on social media and websites: "Revolutionary," said one clinic. "Pure Gold. On Demand," said another.

In a video posted by a Texas plastic surgery practice, audio of Oprah gifting cars to a screaming audience was dubbed over a man in scrubs pretending to dole out alloClae boxes to employees who wriggled with excitement.

Tiger, which is privately held, said this month that alloClae is experiencing "rapid growth" and the company plans to build a 200-person sales force by the end of 2027 to sell alloClae and a similar product in development, dermaClae, to surgeons, med spas, and other buyers.

When Business Insider spoke to Tiger Aesthetics at the end of last year, the company said it was struggling to keep up with demand. Behind the scenes, it was grappling with more than a shortage.

The company was engaged in a back-and-forth with New York's health department. Between October 2024 and May 2025, the agency sent three letters saying that it could not grant Tiger permission to distribute alloClae in the state.

In July 2025, a health inspector visited two Tiger tissue facilities in Pennsylvania and asked why New York doctors were advertising alloClae. Monica Garcia, the COO of Tiger Aesthetic's parent company, said she was unaware of any shipments to the state and asked what the consequences would be if there were, according to a sworn statement from Joseph Giovannetti, the agency's top investigator.

Garcia, in a sworn statement, said the exchange took place at a Tiger affiliate where employees familiar with alloClae weren't present. She said the inspector didn't ask for follow-up information about alloClae distribution to New York, disputing one of Giovannetti's claims.

Giovannetti said the inspection prompted Tiger to stop shipping alloClae directly to New York and start going through New Jersey and Connecticut.

Despite the letters and inspection, Caroline Van Hove, the president of Tiger Medical Holdings affiliate Tiger Aesthetics, provided reassurances about alloClae to at least one New York plastic surgeon. "We can confirm that the New York Department of Health has not reached out to us in connection with our alloClae product," she wrote in an April 2026 letter seen by Business Insider.

Boxes of alloClae were piled up in a New Jersey driveway

Every week or two, starting no later than September 2025, a new set of white boxes would appear at the clapboard, shuttered home of Robert McGee, a nurse who lived on a cul-de-sac in the central New Jersey town of Tinton Falls, according to FedEx records and a state investigator's statement.

The boxes of alloClae would be stacked next to duffle bags and trash cans in McGee's driveway or on his front porch, according to delivery photos and Giovannetti.

Between September 2025 and April 2026, the company sent over 330 boxes of alloClae to McGee, who loaded them in his pickup, drove them the 50 miles into Manhattan, and dropped them off at more than three dozen plastic surgeons and med spas, Giovannetti said.

McGee did not respond to requests for comment.

In January 2026, the state said in a filing that an unidentified "whistleblower" told regulators what was happening. Three months later, health investigators made an "unannounced inspection" at the office of Dr. Adam Schaffner, a Manhattan plastic surgeon.

Schaffner's paper trail laid out a shift in Tiger's shipping processes. Invoices from July 2025 showed Tiger had sent alloClae directly to his Fifth Avenue office. But starting in August, the month after the inspection, the products were mailed to homes and offices in New Jersey and Connecticut, and employees or Ubers would courier them across state lines, the health department said.

Schaffner, who declined to comment, received at least $95,000 worth of alloClae initially shipped to addresses outside of New York, according to invoices filed in court records.

Some boxes went to the New York City office of plastic surgeon Matthew Schulman, the FedEx records show. In a YouTube video posted last fall, he gleefully unpacked 287.5 cubic centimeters of alloClae as the Pointer Sisters' "I'm So Excited" played in the background. Schulman's name, with McGee's home address, was visible on a shipping label.

If Schulman's boxes were typical — as a review of more than a dozen plastic surgeons' unboxing videos on Instagram suggests — a total of 15,840 cubic centimeters of alloClae could have been sent via McGee's home. The prices on 11 of Schaffner's invoices filed in court average $86.29 per cubic centimeter; at that price, more than $1.3 million worth of alloClae could have been shipped through McGee.

Schulman did not respond to requests for comment.

Tiger has asked that the state's allegations be struck from the court record because, among other things, they argue, the health department could be cherry-picking from its investigative file to benefit their case.

Some New York surgeons are still using alloClae

Doctors who received alloClae say they ordered the product from Tiger and didn't know the route it took.

"He had no idea that this was a challenge, or how stuff was showing up, or any of that," said Ken Sterling, an attorney for Dr. Jason Emer. Sterling said Emer has not been contacted by medical authorities.

Samira Shamoon, a publicist for Dr. Darren Smith, said in an email that "when Dr. Smith was using AlloClae, he purchased it directly from the company and had no knowledge of irregularities." Smith is no longer offering the product, she said.

ME Plastic Surgery, which has locations on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue and in Queens, recently updated a blog post to say that it is not offering alloClae.

Several New York doctors said in early June that they're still using alloClae. Tiger has said it's suspending distribution to New York, but the product can still be "legally sold." In the meantime, doctors in the state continue to promote it.

Emer posted an Instagram video on June 12 showing himself injecting alloClae into a patient's buttocks.

"Don't be left behind," the caption reads, along with a peach emoji. The geotag: New York City.

• Cooley is joining a sudden rush of law firms creating their own AI technology, with help from Legora.
• Cooley Go Lab is an online portal built to help startups with routine contract review and drafting.
• The portal will be available exclusively to founders in Y Combinator's summer cohort to start.

Law firms know more clients are asking chatbots for advice before ever calling a lawyer. So legal giant Cooley is building technology that it hopes founders will use instead.

Cooley plans to give select startups access to Cooley Go Lab, an online portal where founders can upload files and ask questions about their documents, Matt Bartus, global cochair of Cooley's emerging companies and venture capital practice, told Business Insider.

To build it, Cooley teamed up with Legora, a fast-growing legal technology startup that sells to law firms and corporate legal departments. Last year, Legora entered a new line of business with what it calls "portals" — white-labeled workspaces where law firms and their clients can work together on legal matters.

Cooley Go Lab is aimed at catching a common startup problem early, Bartus said. Founders often handle routine contracts themselves to avoid outside counsel's hourly rates. That can leave startups with a trail of messy agreements that their first in-house lawyer has to unwind later.

Legora founder Max Junestrand knows the problem well. When he started the company at age 23, he said he used an early version of ChatGPT to rewrite contracts. Junestrand, a software engineer, not a lawyer, said he let some early contracts include an unlimited liability clause — a provision that can leave a company exposed to damages far beyond the value of the deal.

"When our general counsel started, she freaked out," he said.

Cooley is now trying to give the next crop of founders a way to use artificial intelligence to move faster, but with a law firm's guardrails around it.

Cooley Go Lab will have a limited rollout to start. It will be available first to startups in Y Combinator's summer cohort.

Much has changed for startups since Legora's turn in the famed startup accelerator. Teams can write code and release technology faster with coding agents. They are signing customers and growing revenue earlier, and the hottest companies seem to be raising funding nonstop. But moving faster also means legal work that once came later in a startup's life is being pulled closer to the beginning.

At Y Combinator, partner Gustaf Alströmer is seeing that shift play out in real time. In the last batch, a record 14 startups reached $1 million in annual recurring revenue — the amount of revenue a company expects to collect over a year. Alströmer said giving founders access to tools like Cooley Go Lab could help them keep that pace without creating contract-slop.

The portal includes features that review documents like nondisclosure and contractor agreements and flag issues for founders to consider. The tool also draws on Cooley Go, the firm's central hub of standard startup forms, templates, and guidance.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em

Law firms like Cooley are facing a new reality. The better the frontier models get at legal work, the more founders and in-house lawyers may decide they can handle situations themselves rather than send them to outside counsel. Anthropic is trying to make that easier with new tools built for contract review and drafting.

Law firms are now figuring out how to stay relevant as more legal work becomes software-enabled. Some are building their own tech. Kirkland & Ellis has tapped Palantir to help it build tools to manage parts of the firm's private funds practice, while Freshfields is working with Anthropic on software that could eventually be sold to other law firms. Harvey, a leader in legal technology, says it's getting into training custom models for law firms.

Taken together, the moves point to a new attitude spreading across Big Law: If clients are going to use artificial intelligence anyway, law firms want to shape how they use it.

Bartus doesn't seem especially concerned about losing business to in-house legal departments. Cooley has been on a hot streak. Profits rose 6.7% to $922 million last fiscal year. The firm also scored a fair use win for Meta in a copyright case involving its model Llama last year, and it advised Jony Ive's hardware startup Io in a $6.5 billion sale to OpenAI.

Bartus is confident that companies will continue to depend on law firms for the important work. Cooley Go Lab, he said, is meant to help founders handle routine legal work more cleanly, not replace lawyers.

Cooley says the tool is not protected by attorney-client privilege, so founders will need to be careful about what they upload because those materials could be turned over in litigation.

"If you want actual legal advice," he said, "you need to talk to a lawyer."

• Billions of dollars are riding on the promise that artificial intelligence can absorb legal work.
• Crosby, a tech-driven law firm, built a benchmark to measure how well models negotiate contracts.
• Redline Bench is meant to help lawyers answer whether they can trust the technology's work.

Legal technology wants its vibe-coding moment. But first, it has to prove the tools can think like a lawyer.

Taking up the task is Crosby, a startup-meets-law-firm that sells basic legal services to companies, including Cursor and Rogo. On Wednesday, it released the Redline Bench, a tool built to measure how well artificial intelligence models perform real-world legal tasks, starting with contract review.

Software engineers have spent the past few years watching these systems get shockingly good at writing code and debugging errors. Now legal tech companies are chasing a similar prize: artificial intelligence that can review contracts, spot risks, and haggle terms faster and cheaper than lawyers.

But law has a problem that coding does not, says Ryan Daniels, a former in-house lawyer turned Crosby founder. "It's really hard to define 'good' or 'bad,'" he said.

Models can write code that either runs or breaks. Legal work is a murkier target. A sales contract can be edited, or "redlined," in lots of defensible ways, Daniels explains. A change that one lawyer sees as prudent, another might call too aggressive.

That ambiguity has become a headache for companies racing to automate legal work, from the scrappy neofirms to the model labs themselves. Anthropic has spent the past few months courting in-house lawyers with tools built for them. That push has been closely watched by investors. Earlier this year, Anthropic's new legal plugin stirred a sell-off in legal tech stocks.

Benchmarks are one of the main ways companies track progress. The labs building frontier models use them as stress tests, measuring whether a new system is better at tasks than the last one.

Coding has hundreds of benchmarks for evaluating models. But the legal industry still lacks a shared way to answer the question: Is the AI's work any good?

Crosby has been working on a new yardstick. The company pulled its engineers and lawyers into a tactical unit called Crosby Intelligence to build agents for Crosby's law firm and a benchmark to grade them against. That team includes engineer Sharan Ramjee, who worked on transformer models to sniff out fraud at Stripe, and Ross Weiser, a lawyer who joined from elite law firm Sullivan & Cromwell.

Crosby also partnered with Micro1, a company that helps model-makers recruit expert workers, to find more lawyers who could help define what counts as good legal work.

To build the benchmark, senior lawyers simulated software deals and marked the contract changes they considered most important at each stage of the negotiation. Those changes were turned into weighted criteria.

When Crosby runs a new test, it gives models the same contracts and asks them to make their own edits. Then a panel of three judges compares these redlines with the lawyer-built rubric. The judges vote pass or fail on each item, and the final score shows how often the models made the kinds of edits that lawyers considered important.

Redline Bench will be made public so any lab can put its models through Crosby's paces. Crosby also plans to regularly release reports tracking how major models compare.

The first release of the Redline Bench put ChatGPT 5.5 at the top of the heap, with a score of 50.5%, meaning the model's redlines matched half of the edits that lawyers prioritized. Gemini 3.5 Flash followed at 45.1%, and Claude Opus 4.8 scored 44.4%.

Crosby was able to test Anthropic's highly capable new model, Fable 5, only once before Anthropic pulled it off the shelves. The results were promising, with a score of 47.3%. When access is restored, Crosby will run the benchmark again and update it.

Crosby isn't the only company trying to measure how the models stack up. Harvey, one of the best-funded legal startups, has released benchmarks for case law research and contract review.

Anthropic and OpenAI also build their own benchmarks to measure performance on real-world tasks. But Daniels said those results can be hard to trust. Over time, the labs eventually tune their systems to perform well on their own tests, he said.

The stakes are bigger than a scoreboard. Billions of investment dollars are riding on the promise that artificial intelligence can lower legal bills and absorb work that used to pile up on the general counsel's desk.

Lawyers will only use the tools if they trust them. Crosby wants to give them a reason to.

• Mark Lanier said he used AI before and during the social media addiction trial earlier this year.
• Lanier, who won the case against Meta and Google, said AI has transformed his workflow.
• He swears by an AI tool that he pays six figures annually for called Boodlebox.

One morning in February, Mark Lanier woke up after four hours of sleep and started preparing to cross-examine one of the wealthiest people in the world: Mark Zuckerberg.

His team had worked through the night, preparing material for the day ahead that he could then review in the hours before court, all with the help of AI.

Lanier, a nationally known Texas trial lawyer with a reputation for taking on major corporations in high-stakes trials, was representing the plaintiff in a landmark social media addiction case. He said AI allowed his team to do significantly more with the limited hours they had to prep outside the courtroom during the trial, which lasted over a month.

"It's as if I have 10 additional workers who are incredibly well-trained, who know the file inside and out, who work 24 hours a day and don't even need to take a break for the restroom, much less PTO," he told Business Insider, adding, "In the 10 hours I might be working outside of court, I can get 30 hours of work done."

AI in law has been touted both as a major opportunity and a cautionary tale, with many stories of hallucinations and fake citations. While the legal industry grapples with how to use AI, Lanier said it's been a "total game changer" for him.

Lanier won the case against Meta and Google, in which the jury found the companies negligent and ruled they knew their platforms were "dangerous" but failed to warn the plaintiff, who was awarded $6 million. The case was a bellwether for thousands of similar lawsuits brought against social media companies.

While Lanier had used the most popular AI products, he said the AI tool he relied on before and during the trial was Boodlebox, calling it "Disney World compared to a swing set in the backyard."

A leader in the education technology space, Boodlebox provides access to major models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, allowing users to switch between them or compare results. It's also collaborative, allowing Lanier and his team of lawyers to work with the AIs in the same digital workspace.

Lanier worked with Boodlebox to create a custom license that costs him six figures annually and is tailored to his needs.

"We could, in essence, take my brain, take 42 years of my experience, take the things that I have learned and studied and published and not published and incorporate it into the brain that drove my AI queries and results," he said.

He relied on AI before and during the landmark trial

Lanier is careful when talking specifics about how he deploys his AI. He says it's a matter of "trade craft" and that his firm is "doing some things that nobody else is doing."

One example he gave included taking transcripts from court each day and asking different models to evaluate them. He said AI is also great for finding a more creative or visceral way to describe something in court. He even would feed AI jury notes that came up during deliberations and ask it to evaluate where the jury was in the process.

At the end of court each day, they'd meet in his war room, debrief, and assign tasks to everyone, such as pulling the five most critical documents supporting point A. The team would then break and do much of that work in Boodlebox, allowing him to review what they've put together and how. He said he and his team, which includes several of his daughters, spent thousands of hours on the platform.

While most of Boodlebox's clients are big universities, a company representative told Business Insider that the platform is also exploring more enterprise and law adoption, in part because of its work with Lanier.

Lanier said he doesn't use AI in the way that often gets people into trouble. "I'm not going to say, 'Go do my research and write my brief,'" he said, adding that there was one instance in the case where AI cited something from the record and he knew it wasn't correct.

"It's not unbridled," he said. "You are an important part of the equation."

His advice to other lawyers trying to use AI was to keep up with the developments in the rapidly evolving field. He has an AI team at his firm that sends him a document every Friday with all the developments in AI, typically three pages single-spaced.

"Next trial, I will make what I did last trial look like Fred Flintstone and the Stone Age," he said.

• USCIS issued new green-card guidance before the holiday weekend.
• BI spoke with six immigration lawyers about the fallout from the memo.
• Lawyers said anxious clients asked whether their yearslong plans had changed overnight.

Lynden Melmed was supposed to be spending part of his Friday with family visiting from Germany. They were touring the Capitol and learning how the American government works during the long holiday weekend.

Then, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services released a memo about green card applicants. Melmed, a partner at BAL and former US Citizenship and Immigration Services chief counsel, stayed behind to read it and field client questions.

"You do unfortunately need to clear your schedule," Melmed said. "That's just an occupational hazard of being an immigration lawyer."

On Friday, USCIS announced that it would grant "adjustment of status" — the process that lets some immigrants in the US apply for green cards without leaving — only in "extraordinary circumstances."

The decision could force many immigrants to leave the country and continue their green card applications abroad rather than completing the process in the US.

A USCIS spokesperson, Zach Kahler, said on Friday that the new guidance likely wouldn't impact "people who present applications that provide an economic benefit or otherwise are in the national interest."

Business Insider spoke with six immigration lawyers across the US who work with tech workers, startup founders, physicians, investors, and other foreign national workers. They described a holiday weekend packed with calls, texts, and emails from anxious clients trying to understand whether yearslong green-card plans had changed overnight.

The questions were practical: Should workers keep filing green-card applications? Should they wait? Would pending cases be affected? Should people avoid international travel?

Companies were also asking whether this was serious enough to brief senior executives immediately.

For now, the answer was a cautious wait-and-see.

"I started hearing from my clients and from other immigration attorneys within minutes of this memo dropping on Friday morning," said Loren Locke, an immigration attorney who works with multinational corporate clients. "It has thrown a lot of uncertainty into something that's been very stable and very predictable for decades, out of nowhere, with no warning."

Brian Hunt, counsel at immigration firm Fragomen, said his company began hearing from clients on Friday and "pretty much worked all weekend."

"Everyone wants answers as to what this memo means," he said.

For employers, the concern is not abstract. Consular processing can be slow and unpredictable, lawyers said, and companies may struggle if workers have to leave the US without knowing when they can return.

"I don't know how people could just leave their job for months and come back," Hunt said.

Multiple lawyers compared the rollout to a September presidential proclamation signed by President Donald Trump that raised the H-1B petition fee to $100,000, which sparked immediate alarm before later guidance softened its apparent impact.

Several attorneys also said Friday's announcement appeared more severe than the underlying memo.

At Bay Immigration Law, which works with startup founders and tech workers, Otto Van Maerssen said many existing clients were seeking reassurance. "For some of them, it was, is it even possible now to adjust status?" Van Maerssen, a senior partner, said.

TJ Albrecht, managing director at Bay Immigration, estimated that client outreach surged over the long weekend. He said the firm's reaction oscillated between "dread and optimism" as lawyers compared the memo with the USCIS press release announcing the change.

"So, we think that the vast majority, at least from our clients, will ultimately not be affected," he said. Other visa applicants — like students and B-1 temporary business visitors — might not be so lucky.

Divij Kishore, founder of the immigration-focused firm Flagship Law, said clients asked whether they should continue with green-card applications, what would happen to pending cases, and whether staying in the US still made sense.

"There's a sense of fatigue that I'm starting to see in the people that I represent," Kishore said. "I'm concerned that in the way that it's been released to the public and the way it's been reported to the public so far, there's a knee-jerk reaction that's happening where people are acting out of fear rather than proactive decision-making and thoughtful decision-making."

Locke said the memo arrived at the end of a yearslong process for some workers who had followed the rules, renewed visas, built careers, and started families in the US.

"It has been chaotic," she said. "Right now, we are waiting to see what USCIS does."

USCIS didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• A personal injury lawyer apologized for filing court documents with fabricated quotations.
• The lawyer told the judge that he had begun using software from a venture-backed startup called Eve.
• The episode highlights a growing risk for the startups selling artificial intelligence to lawyers.

Lawyers keep getting burned by artificial intelligence that invents cases and makes up quotes. Now, some attorneys are naming the software they used.

Last month, a Louisiana personal injury lawyer apologized after submitting briefs that cited a real court decision but quoted passages that didn't exist. The mistakes appeared in two filings in the 19th Judicial District Court in Baton Rouge and were flagged by opposing counsel.

"I'm trying to understand how I made this mistake," Ross LeBlanc, a partner at Dudley DeBosier, wrote in a private letter to Judge William Jorden on March 27. Earlier this year, he said, he began using an artificial intelligence program called Eve to draft pleadings. At first, he checked the citations often. "They were always correct when I checked them," he wrote.

That consistency gave him confidence, and eventually, he stopped checking, he said.

"I never thought this could happen to me," LeBlanc wrote, adding that he could not be sure whether the mistake involved Eve's software or if he copied and pasted something too hastily.

Jay Madheswaranm, Eve's chief executive, told Business Insider on Thursday that after a close audit of the case with Dudley DeBosier, the company confirmed Eve "did not hallucinate any case citations in this matter," including any fabricated quotations.

Courts have slapped sanctions on attorneys for filing briefs with errors created by artificial intelligence — often called "hallucinations." Last week, Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the country's oldest and most elite law firms, apologized to a federal judge over a similar slip-up.

What's new here is the blame game. When an attorney names the tools involved, the companies behind the software are put in the spotlight and could face reputational repercussions.

Legal software companies like Harvey, Legora, and Eve have raised billions of dollars on the promise that they can make lawyers faster — and offer firms a level of reliability that general-purpose tools can't match. If their software starts to embarrass customers in court, that trust erodes.

Damien Charlotin, a French researcher who tracks hallucinations in court filings, estimates that fewer than 10% of cases identify the software used. Many lawyers, he suspects, keep that part private because they're relying on free chatbots like ChatGPT or other off-the-shelf tools that may not be authorized for client work.

Last year, a Latham & Watkins lawyer defending Anthropic in a copyright lawsuit made headlines after citing an article that does not exist. The lawyer said the mistake stemmed from using Anthropic's own chatbot, Claude, which fabricated an article title and authors.

Eve builds software for plaintiff-side lawyers using large language models, helping them draft documents, map out medical histories, and send and respond to discovery requests. The company was valued at $1 billion after it raised a $103 million funding round about a year ago. Madheswaranm said Eve now processes more than 200,000 documents and other results a month — up around 100-fold from a year ago.

LeBlanc told the judge that he had been wary of the technology generally because of the "horror stories" about hallucinated case law. He said he was persuaded after Eve pitched the tool to his firm and assured attorneys it had safeguards to reduce errors. He believed the risk was limited as long as he conducted his own legal research and directed the software to rely only on approved sources.

Then, opposing counsel in the personal injury case pointed out his mistakes.

LeBlanc's apology surfaced this month in a separate case involving a trip-and-fall at a Lowe's store. The opposing counsel found hallucinations in a brief filed by Dudley DeBosier and included LeBlanc's letter in a request urging the court to expand its inquiry into possible sanctions.

Dudley DeBosier has filed a motion to strike opposing counsel's request because it says the cases are unrelated. The firm also indicated that a lawyer used Claude to help draft the brief in the Lowe's case.

It's a view widely shared across software companies and law firms that artificial intelligence can assist in research and drafting, but responsibility for the final product remains with the human who signs the filing.

Madheswaran said Eve makes that explicit in its contracts and onboarding with new customers. The software also includes features designed to catch errors before they reach a courtroom, though they don't always work. Some errors are harder to spot than others, he said. Confirming a case exists is easier than verifying a quote is exact.

As the legal profession races to adopt artificial intelligence, mistakes are more likely to be caught. Courts are getting wiser to the technology, and opposing counsel are adjusting their tactics. Instead of only attacking legal arguments, lawyers are scanning filings for errors that could undermine the other side's credibility.

Chad Dudley, a founding partner of Dudley DeBosier, a firm with about 40 attorneys, said it trains its lawyers to carefully review generated results and requires them to agree to use the technology responsibly.

For his part, LeBlanc said he hopes other lawyers learn from his mistake. He told Business Insider on Thursday that Eve helped him move faster under time pressure, but after the errors surfaced, he felt "sick to my stomach" and couldn't sleep.

"I'm responsible for checking everything, no matter what technology comes along," he said.

He doesn't blame Eve for the blunder. Still, he's setting the tool down for now.

"I feel like, given what happened," he said, "it's fair to have a cooling off period, you know, touch grass."

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at mrussell@businessinsider.com or Signal at @MeliaRussell.01. Use a personal email address and a non-work device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• Sam Altman showed up in court as jury selection began in a civil trial between him and Elon Musk.
• Some potential jurors offered unfavorable views about AI — and Musk.
• Musk sued OpenAI, Altman, and OpenAI president Greg Brockman two years ago.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made an unexpected appearance in a California courtroom Monday as jury selection in his high-stakes legal feud with Elon Musk kicked off.

Altman, who wore a dark-colored suit and white shirt, was spotted inside the Oakland courtroom, where some potential jurors in the federal civil trial shared unfavorable views about artificial intelligence — and Musk, the world's richest man.

"Elon doesn't care about people, just like our president," one prospective juror told US District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.

The man, who works in construction and described himself as a "meme junky" and a "dying breed" who still gets print newspaper subscriptions, added that he thinks Musk only cares about money.

Another prospective juror who works for the city of Oakland said he has a strong opinion about Musk. He said that he would do his "best" to approach the case without bias, even though he called Musk a "jerk" in a pre-trial jury questionnaire.

Musk was not in attendance for day one of the trial between two of the tech industry's most powerful billionaires. Since it is a civil trial, the parties are not required to appear unless they are testifying. Up until now, Musk and Altman have largely left the matter to their lawyers, aside from the occasional online jab.

The Tesla CEO sued OpenAI, Altman, and OpenAI president Greg Brockman two years ago, alleging that they intentionally "deceived" him into cofounding the company with them in 2015.

Musk alleges in his lawsuit that he poured tens of millions into OpenAI to support its founding mission as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI for the public's benefit, only for that mission to later be abandoned, in part, through the company's partnership with Microsoft. Microsoft is also named as a defendant in Musk's lawsuit.

The lawsuit seeks more than $100 billion in damages, along with sweeping changes to the structure of the $850 billion company behind ChatGPT. The case comes as OpenAI is reportedly preparing for an initial public offering.

Earlier Monday, Musk and OpenAI traded barbs on Musk's X platform about the case, with Musk referring to Altman as "Scam Altman" and OpenAI ripping Musk's lawsuit as a "baseless and jealous bid to derail a competitor."

Musk is expected to testify in the weeks-long trial, along with Altman and other tech execs like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Some potential jurors questioned on Monday told the court that they had reservations surrounding AI.

A registered nurse said she doesn't trust AI and isn't a fan of how the rapidly advancing technology is being used in the workplace.

"It's just giving me more work to do," said the woman who explained that her employer uses AI tools to process patient records that she still has to review for errors.

One woman who works in the psychiatric patient care unit at Stanford University said she had some concerns about AI but could approach the case with an open mind.

"I personally don't use it much because I do find that I have to double check everything, and at this point, I might as well do it myself," said the woman, who was ultimately chosen to sit on the jury.

A different juror prospect, a PhD student in genetics, said she has a ChatGPT subscription and uses it, along with Anthropic's Claude, to write code and emails.

Concerns of the juror prospects were also reflected outside the courthouse, where protesters gathered to demonstrate against AI. A person in a robot suit wore a sign that said, "Altman's AI enslaver." A giant inflatable tube figure read: "Elon sucks."

By the end of Monday, nine jurors were selected for the trial. Opening arguments are set to begin Tuesday.

At one point, Musk's attorney, Steven Molo, asked the judge to dismiss a juror prospect who called Musk a "greedy, racist, homophobic piece of garbage" in her questionnaire and another who wrote that Musk is a "world-class jerk."

"Look, the reality is that people don't like him," the judge told Musk's legal team about their client. "But that doesn't mean that Americans, nevertheless, can't have integrity for the judicial process."

• Every December, I travel with my mother-in-law and wife. This year, we took a trip to Charleston.
• Encouraging my mother-in-law to help plan led us to experiences we wouldn't have found on our own.
• We built the days around what she could handle and took turns picking activities and restaurants.

My wife, Cece, moved from Texas to Australia 12 years ago, but we still head back to the US every Christmas.

While we're home, the two of us take a trip with her mother, Liz. Liz's partner, Pete, doesn't like to travel, so this annual December trip is her primary holiday.

In the past, we've headed to Nashville, Seattle, and Washington DC. At the end of last year, we spent four days in Charleston and had a wonderful trip.

We picked activities at Liz's pace and took turns choosing experiences

Over the years, we've learned that Liz enjoys a trip more when she can help shape it rather than just show up for it. So before heading to Charleston, I had a visitor's brochure mailed to her in Texas.

The day it arrived, she called with a list of things she had already researched and wanted to try, including a Gullah Geechee tour to learn about the history and culture of the descendants of enslaved Africans who settled along the Carolina coast.

Bus and walking tours were available, and we chose the bus even though I would've preferred the latter.

It was important for us to consider what would be most sustainable for my 75-year-old mother-in-law when booking activities. Riding the bus meant Liz could arrive at lunch with energy instead of blisters.

Throughout the trip, we also took turns selecting activities so no one felt left out. My choice was a cocktail-making class, which is also indoors and offers plenty of seating.

Liz drinks a little but would never have thought to book a class like this herself, which is another perk of taking turns: You get to try things you never thought you would.

The class ended up being just the three of us at a bar with a 25-year-old instructor. We learned how the Old Fashioned got its name, what makes a good bartender, and that Liz pours generously. Her first attempt overflowed.

By the third round, Liz was jiggling the shaker like a professional and informing us she was keeping up with "the young kids."

The instructor even invited her behind the bar. She posed for the camera, and we sent the video straight to Pete. He replied: "Oh boy. She's really loving this."

Liz also chose for us to visit the Charleston City Market, a stretch of local vendors and artists that has been running for centuries.

We'd planned to stop for an hour and stayed for over two as Liz watched sweetgrass baskets being woven, bought Christmas ornaments, and talked to every artisan who'd stand still long enough.

I walked ahead and checked my watch several times, but tried to stay patient. Liz had taken a whole cocktail-making class she'd never have picked herself, so two hours at the market felt fair.

Each of us got to choose a meal, too

Over our four days, we each picked a meal to share. Liz chose Lewis BBQ, partly because it's run by a fellow Texan, which she felt was a good sign.

She takes barbecue seriously, and the brisket was the real test. Her wide post-bite smile told me the barbecue had passed.

I took us to Southern restaurant Poogan's Porch one night so we could order shrimp and grits, something I'd never tried.

Cece chose to get breakfast on our last morning at Callie's Hot Little Biscuits. We ordered a range of sweet and savory bites, and Cece and I managed to take down one biscuit each.

Liz had two and a half and immediately bought a box to take home.

In the end, a few things made the trip work

Encouraging my mother-in-law to plan from Texas meant she arrived at our destination already invested with ideas we'd never have found on our own.

Picking activities at a pace that suited everyone, like the Gullah Geechee bus tour and the cocktail-making class, meant no one was worn out by dinner — and taking turns meant nobody got dragged through someone else's idea of fun for too long.

At the end of the trip, Liz flew home to San Antonio with biscuits, cocktail recipes, and Christmas ornaments. Her partner said she looked like she was having the time of her life in the photos and videos we sent, though the cocktails are still a work in progress.

We've already begun planning this December's trip, so I should probably send a new brochure to Liz soon.

• Nicolás Maduro faces narco-terrorism charges in the US and awaits trial while legal fees remain unpaid.
• He was arrested in Venezuela and brought to the US in early January of this year.
• Maduro's Thursday court hearing focused on how his defense lawyers will get paid.

Eighty-two days after US military forces seized him and his wife from Caracas, Nicolás Maduro, the toppled president of Venezuela, walks into his 26th-floor Manhattan courtroom for the second time.

He has a long road to his trial.

The US Justice Department's narco-terrorism and weapons charges against Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, still do not have a trial date. His attorney has said he expects "voluminous" motions challenging his seizure and detention.

The criminal case hasn't gotten to those issues yet.

Thursday's hearing focuses on how those lawyers will get paid.

The Venezuelan government has said it would pay for Maduro's and Flores's legal fees. But the payments are being held up by the US Treasury Department, which has not issued a waiver on the sanctions against Venezuela. Kyle Wirshba, the lead prosecutor in the case, said the payments were withheld because of "national security and foreign policy" reasons.

The issue appears to annoy US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, the 92-year-old judge overseeing the criminal case.

Peering through his large, round glasses that magnified his cheeks, he asks Wirshba how — when the Trump administration was doing business with Venezuela — Maduro and his wife could possibly present a "national security" threat.

"The defendant is here. Flores is here," Hellerstein says. "They present no national security threat."

Since their arrest, Maduro and Flores have been held in the Metropolitan Detention Center, the infamous Brooklyn jail that has also been the temporary home of Sean "Diddy" Combs, Luigi Mangione, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Jeffrey Epstein's associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

Thursday's court hearing, across the East River, in Manhattan, begins 40 minutes late. Across the street from the courthouse, groups of pro-Maduro and anti-Maduro protesters shout at each other in front of a playground.

When Maduro walks into the courtroom, he has a bright, beaming smile on his face.

"Good morning!" he booms, wearing a jail outfit of a drab khaki smock over a bright orange shirt.

He shakes hands with his lead attorney, Barry Pollack, best known for representing Julian Assange. Then he turns to the journalists sitting on dark-wood benches in the audience and wishes them "good morning" again.

Flores, wearing the same outfit, plus a brown scrunchie holding back her blonde hair, says nothing.

When they sit at the defense table, they wear big, black headphones through which they hear the court proceedings translated into Spanish for them.

During the hearing, Flores's attorney Mark Donnelly says "First Lady Maduro" needed an echocardiogram to evaluate an issue with her heart.

"There are no titles to be used in this court," the judge says, before telling the lawyer to keep him informed if Flores didn't get the treatment she needed in jail.

Venezuela's now-former first couple ended up in New York City to face an indictment brought by the Department of Justice.

Prosecutors accuse them of participating in a decadeslong drug-trafficking conspiracy involving Colombian terrorist organizations, which enriched themselves and their family at the expense of Venezuelan citizens. The charges include narco-terrorism, cocaine importation, and machine gun possession.

In January, after US forces captured the couple from a military fort in Caracas where they were staying, President Donald Trump called Maduro an "illegitimate dictator" responsible for funneling "colossal amounts of deadly illicit drugs" into the United States.

The President said that he and his wife "now face American justice" for their "campaign of deadly narco-terrorism."

From the White House on Thursday, Trump called Maduro a "very dangerous man who has killed a lot of people" and said the charges against him were for just "a fraction" of his conduct — with more to come.

"Other cases are going to be brought, as you probably know," he said.

But today is not yet about the core of the matter.

Wirshba, the prosecutor, argues that it would be inappropriate for OFAC, the part of the Treasury Department that grants licenses for sanctions waivers, to allow Maduro and Flores to access the wealth of the nation they "plundered."

According to Wirshba, Maduro should have anticipated he could not have gotten the money from Venezuela to the US due to the sanctions, leading Hellerstein to remark upon the oddness of the Venezuelan president being captured from his nation and brought to New York City.

"He didn't think he would be in this court?" The judge asks with a sarcastic tone.

Hellerstein — who has overseen cases involving financial scammers like Charlie Javice, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and the 9/11 terror attacks in his 28 years on the bench — calls Maduro's case "unique."

While there have been other cases that addressed whether criminal defendants could use potentially "tainted" funds to pay their lawyers, all of those cases involved money that was already held in a US bank. In any case, Hellerstein says, Venezuela had already agreed to pay for the legal defense.

When a criminal defendant can't afford their own lawyer, a judge can appoint one for them. But Hellerstein says the "investigative responsibilities" that would be required to defend the complex narco-terrorism case would overwhelm the resources of a publicly-funded lawyer.

But it remains unclear what Hellerstein could do about it. Forcing OFAC to issue a waiver would require a separate lawsuit brought in a different court, in Washington, DC, Wirshba says.

The only remedy, Pollack says, was to "dismiss the case" and let Maduro walk free.

Hellerstein initially pours cold water on the idea.

"I'm not going to dismiss the case," he says.

But if OFAC didn't soon change its position, he would consider it.

"I think it is such a serious step — I'm not going to take it now," Hellerstein said.

After one and a half hours, Hellerstein decides he would hold another hearing, at an unspecified later date, to determine what steps he should take.

When Maduro leaves the courtroom, he only glances back at the audience behind him. He shakes the hands of his attorneys and walks stiffly toward the door. Flores kisses her lawyer, Donnelly, on the cheek.

Outside, the protesters are leaving. As a man passes by the courthouse, he yells: "Viva Maduro!"

• A federal judge has temporarily struck down the Pentagon's effective blacklisting of Anthropic.
• US District Judge Rita Lin's ruling hands a major victory to the AI frontier model maker.
• The Pentagon has already struck a deal with OpenAI and is looking to find other AI companies.

A federal judge has granted Anthropic a major reprieve as the AI company challenges the Pentagon's effective blacklisting.

On Thursday, US District Judge Rita Lin granted Anthropic's request for a preliminary injunction to temporarily block the "Presidential Directive" that ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's technology, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's decision to formally label the AI frontier model maker as a "supply chain risk."

Lin also stayed the effective date of the supply-chain designation, meaning that it cannot take place while the injunction is in place.

The decision is a victory for Anthropic and its CEO Dario Amodei, who refused to bow to Hegseth's demands. It is not immediately clear if the Justice Department will appeal the decision. In the hours after talks with Anthropic fell apart, the Pentagon struck a deal with OpenAI.

"We're grateful to the court for moving swiftly, and pleased they agree Anthropic is likely to succeed on the merits," an Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement. "While this case was necessary to protect Anthropic, our customers, and our partners, our focus remains on working productively with the government to ensure all Americans benefit from safe, reliable AI."

Spokespeople for the Pentagon and White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In court filings, Anthropic officials said the risk designation could jeopardize potentially billions in revenue. If the injunction remains, Anthropic will be able to continue to do business with defense contractors.

Lin wrote in her decision that the injunction does not require the Defense Department to use Anthropic's products or services.

Many in tech are closely watching the California case, since it tests whether the federal government can use some of its most severe powers to force a major AI company to agree to contractual terms. Microsoft, which filed an amicus brief in support of Anthropic, also said it was concerned about potential repercussions if companies like itself continued to partner with Anthropic.

Ahead of her ruling, Lin grilled the Justice Department over what she said looked like "an attempt to cripple Anthropic." She said that the Pentagon could have simply discontinued using Claude, but instead, the Trump administration made repeated actions that appeared to be designed to "punish" the company.

"One of the amicus briefs used the term 'attempted corporate murder.' I don't know if it's murder, but it looks like an attempt to cripple Anthropic," Lin said during the hearing. "And specifically, my concern is whether Anthropic is being punished for criticizing the government's contracting position in the press."

Beyond the California case, Anthropic has a separate suit pending in the D.C. Circuit over the supply chain risk designation.

It also remains to be seen how the White House and the broader Trump administration will treat Anthropic beyond the actions Lin's ruling compels.

During the hearing, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Eric Hamilton repeatedly said that the Pentagon questions Anthropic's "reliability and trustworthiness." Hamilton said that defense officials are concerned Anthropic may try to improperly skew its AI models or shut off access.

In recent weeks, Hegseth, who met with Amodei, said the AI startup put "Silicon Valley ideology above American lives." President Donald Trump decried the "WOKE COMPANY" run by " Leftwing nut jobs" in a Truth Social post that was also part of the California lawsuit.

"Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY," Trump wrote on Truth Social on February 27.

• Meta and YouTube were found negligent in a landmark social media addiction trial.
• The case centered on a woman who said social media harmed her mental health from a young age.
• The case is viewed as a key test of how juries may see dozens of similar pending lawsuits.

Meta and Google were found negligent in a social media addiction trial in Los Angeles on Wednesday, potentially setting the stage for dozens of similar lawsuits that have been brought against Big Tech companies.

The case centered on a 20-year-old woman, identified as KGM, who said her use of social media from a young age was detrimental to her mental health and accused the companies of knowingly engineering their products to addict kids.

After nine days of deliberation, the jury found Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Google, which owns YouTube, negligent. In a 10-to-2 vote, the jury also ruled that the two companies knew their design was "dangerous" but failed to warn the plaintiffs.

The jury awarded the plaintiff $6 million. That's $3 million in compensatory damages and an additional $3 million in punitive damages.

The jury determined Meta was responsible for 70% of the harm, while YouTube was responsible for 30%. That means the total damages owed by Meta is $4.2 million, while YouTube owes $1.8 million.

The plaintiff's lead counsel, the Lanier Law Firm, called the verdict "a referendum" in a statement. "For years, social media companies have profited from targeting children while concealing their addictive and dangerous design features," the statement said.

Spokespeople for Meta and Google both said the companies disagreed with the verdicts and plan to appeal.

"Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app," a Meta spokesperson said. "We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online."

"This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site," the Google spokesperson said.

The Los Angeles state court trial has been viewed as a bellwether, offering a key test of how juries may see similar personal injury lawsuits brought by over 2,000 individuals. Meta has said potential damages in certain cases could reach into the "high tens of billions of dollars."

TikTok and Snapchat were also defendants, but settled the lawsuit before the trial began.

Meta executives testified at the trial last month, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri, drawing large crowds of media and concerned parents, including some involved in other social media addiction lawsuits. YouTube's VP of engineering, Cristos Goodrow, also testified.

The companies have argued that plaintiffs' struggles are due to myriad reasons and can't necessarily be linked to social media.

During Meta's closing argument at the Los Angeles trial, Paul Schmidt, one of the company's attorneys, said the plaintiff needed to prove that if Instagram were taken away from KGM, her "life would be meaningfully different."

"The evidence has shown just the opposite," Schmidt said.

In January, Meta warned investors that its mounting legal battles related to youth safety could "significantly impact" its 2026 financial results. Attorneys for more than 100,000 individual arbitration claimants have "sent mass arbitration demands relating to 'social media addiction'" since late 2024, the company said in a 2026 10-K, specifically noting the case in Los Angeles, as well as a separate case in New Mexico.

The New Mexico case, which occurred at the same time as the Los Angeles trial, addressed different legal and technical issues.

On Tuesday, a jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million after a verdict came down in the state's lawsuit against the company about sexual exploitation.

Meta said it would appeal the case.

• Lawyers for Michael Jeffries say he is incompetent ahead of his October sex trafficking trial.
• At a hearing Tuesday, a defense expert said the ex-CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch is severely impaired.
• She also alluded to a prison tape, in which Jeffries said doctors "better find me incompetent."

Former Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Michael Jeffries was recorded on prison tape last year saying doctors 'better find me incompetent," a defense psychologist testified on Tuesday.

The testimony came as Jeffries sat in a federal courtroom in Central Islip, New York, for the start of a three-day mental competency hearing.

Jeffries, 81, is fighting sex-trafficking charges that allege that while helming the international retail giant, he used his wealth and power to abuse dozens of aspiring male models.

His lawyers are hoping to prove he is mentally incompetent to stand trial alongside two co-defendants — long-term romantic partner Matthew Smith and a third man in their employ. Jury selection is scheduled to start on October 26.

Federal prosecutors maintain Jeffries is competent. It's a conclusion they say is supported by their own doctors and more than 100 of Jeffries' phone calls with Smith.

The calls were recorded last year, during the ex-CEO's four-month stay in the mental health unit of a federal prison in North Carolina.

Defense lawyer Brian H. Bieber raised one potentially damaging tape early in Tuesday's hearing. He asked his first defense expert if there is a tape in which Jeffries is "hoping for a good outcome?"

The witness, Jacqueline C. Valdes, a clinical neuro-psychologist, said yes, and referenced a recorded conversation where Jeffries says, "You better find me incompetent," in reference to his prison mental health examiners.

"He was just saying things without a filter," Valdes explained, addressing US District Court Judge Nusrat Choudhury. "It's just another example of the disinhibited behavior I was talking about earlier," Valdes told the judge.

Other examples include Jeffries using "words like bitch'" in conversations with prison mental health workers, Valdes said. "He was repeatedly described as being a little too personal," she told the judge.

"It happened with me," during her examinations of Jeffries earlier this year, she added. "He was sometimes jocular, sometimes too personal in his interactions with me."

Defense lawyers have argued that Jeffries has a ten-year history of severe cognitive impairment from advancing Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia, a progressive neurodegenerative condition.

Jeffries' erratic behavior is symptomatic of his illness, and could cause him to "blurt out" self-incriminating statements in front of the judge or prospective jurors, the defense has argued.

On Tuesday, Valdes said Jeffries' inappropriate behavior is part of a spectrum of dementia symptoms made worse by the lingering effects of a fall during a trip to South Africa in 2018, four years after his retirement.

Even before his October 2024 indictment, Jeffries was prone to hallucinations, wandering, delusional thinking, and "acting out his dreams," symptoms she said have been helped somewhat by medication.

Smith told her during a 2023 interview that Jeffries was "found in a neighbor's yard, sitting in his underwear and being unable to move," Valdes said.

Now free on $10 million bail, Jeffries sat quietly at the defense table throughout Tuesday's testimony, his mouth set in a tight frown. He turned his head to look at whoever spoke, and kept his hands clasped in front of him or fiddled with a pen.

Speaking with others is Jeffries' strong suit, Valdes told the judge, again referencing the prison tapes.

"He can converse," she testified. "Language abilities are actually his strongest ability."

But scans show evidence of brain atrophy and other markers of dementia, she said, and he tests extremely low in memory and comprehension.

Last year, he appeared flummoxed when asked to name as many fruits and vegetables as he could, she said, calling his response "on the bottom 3% for his age." His recall of a list of 16 words was at the bottom 1% for his age, she said.

Federal prosecutors counter that in December — after his release from four months of examinations and treatment at Butner — their own doctors found Jeffries could understand his charges and assist in his defense, the criteria for competency to stand trial.

They plan to call three of their own psych experts to testify during the hearing — and to play sections of last year's prison tape in court.

Jeffries, Smith, and employee James T. Jacobson have all pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking and interstate prostitution charges. They face mandatory minimum sentences of 15 years and as much as life in prison if convicted.

Know a lawyer whose style is as sharp as their mind? We want to hear from you.

Business Insider is searching for the best-dressed lawyers in New York City for a new editorial feature spotlighting standout style. We're looking for attorneys who bring personality to the profession — the ones who serve looks as well as they practice law.

Our editorial judging panel will consider nominees of all titles, from associate to managing partner, at major law firms in New York City. Firms may also nominate multiple employees.

To strengthen your submission, please include a headshot and two photos that showcase the nominee's personal style.

Selected honorees will be featured in a Business Insider photo shoot in early May (exact dates and location to follow).

• At law firms, the billable hour is the standard way to charge clients. But timekeeping is a pain.
• The startup PointOne says it's using AI to help lawyers auto-complete timesheets and bill more time.
• PointOne raised $16 million in a funding round led by the venture capital firm 8VC.

Tracking hours is part of how lawyers get paid. It's also the bane of the profession.

A startup called PointOne wants to eliminate the most tedious part of a lawyer's job. It says its AI-powered platform passively tracks a lawyer's computer activity and uses it to complete timesheets.

The company grew revenue tenfold since July, says PointOne cofounder Katon Luaces, after signing up dozens of law firm customers, ranging from a global 1,200-lawyer outfit to solo practitioners.

Investors are taking notice. After making a small earlier investment, the Joe Londsale-founded venture firm 8VC is leading a $16 million Series A round for PointOne, Luaces tells Business Insider. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator also participated.

Founders are flooding into legal tech, betting they can turn large language models into products law firms will trust — and competing for attention in an estimated $1 trillion industry.

Jack Moshkovich, an 8VC partner, said the market is crowded with companies trying to help lawyers do work faster. That leaves more whitespace, he said, on the operational side of the business.

Luaces isn't a lawyer. In 2019, he was a computer science major and a Google intern as the company's researchers were laying the groundwork for modern large language models.

He saw legal work as a natural target for the technology because so much of it is repetitive and text-heavy. By 2023, he and his roommate, Jeremy Ben-Meir, along with a third cofounder, Adrian Parlow, started sketching out an idea for a legal startup. (Parlow left PointOne last year and joined legal-tech giant Legora.)

When Luaces asked lawyers which part of the job they hated most, he kept hearing the same answer: timekeeping. At most law firms, the billable hour is the standard way to charge clients. Lawyers log the work they do for each client — often in six-minute increments — then tally those hours and bill accordingly. Many still track their hours in a spreadsheet or by hand on a legal pad.

PointOne's platform runs in the background as lawyers move between apps, then fills in time entries with the client, matter, a description of the work, and standardized legal codes.

Security and confidentiality are essential for law firms. Clients trust them with trade secrets and other closely held information, leaving little room for error from any software vendor.

When asked how lawyers feel about software watching them work, Luaces said their dislike of timekeeping helps overcome any discomfort. PointOne says it encrypts stored sensitive data, does not train models on firm data, and gives firms the option to use models in a private Azure environment.

For lawyers, "this is like magic beans," Luaces said.

Time savings aren't the point

Law firms are still working out how to use artificial intelligence to work faster without hurting their economics. Software that saves time can also reduce the number of hours a firm can bill.

PointOne, however, is not pitching itself as a way to save lawyers' time. Instead, it says it can help firms capture time that would otherwise go unbilled.

Some share of legal work never makes it into timesheets. Junior lawyers may undercount how long a task took, either because they're still learning or because they're embarrassed. More often, Luaces said, lawyers skip billing for small tasks because logging them takes almost as long as the work itself.

A lawyer might spend four minutes writing a client email. "I can either spend the next four minutes creating the time entry for it, or I can do more work," Luaces said. "Nine out of 10 times, everyone chooses to do more work."

He says the company's software can increase revenue by capturing billable time that would otherwise be lost.

PointOne isn't the only company making such promises. Its biggest competitor, Laurel, provides professional services firms with analytics about their operations, including time. It's raised over $150 million in funding since 2016, compared to PointOne's $20 million total.

PointOne wants to position itself for a broader shift in how legal work gets priced. Corporate clients are pushing back on soaring legal bills, and as artificial intelligence threatens to trim billable hours, firms are under pressure to test alternatives to hourly billing, including fixed fees for certain matters. Luaces said PointOne's data can help firms better understand the labor behind a matter, which in turn can help them price that work more precisely.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at mrussell@businessinsider.com or Signal at @MeliaRussell.01. Use a personal email address and a non-work device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• A competency hearing is set to begin Tuesday in the sex trafficking case against Michael Jeffries.
• His lawyers hope to prove the ex-CEO of retail giant Abercrombie & Fitch is mentally unfit for trial.
• They say he has dementia and could "blurt out self-incriminating statements" in front of a jury.

As CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch some 20 years ago, Michael Jeffries helmed an international retail giant whose advertising was steeped in racy images of beachside adventure and shirtless young men.

On Tuesday, Jeffries, 81, must appear in a Long Island courtroom for a sex trafficking case that alleges he used his power and wealth to abuse dozens of aspiring male models.

Jeffries' lawyers are set to argue during three days of hearings this week that their client, now 81, is mentally incompetent to be tried on those charges.

The ex-CEO, who pleaded not guilty to the charges in 2024, has Alzheimer's and Lewy body dementia, a neurodegenerative disease, his lawyers say. Jeffries also suffers continuing effects from a traumatic brain injury, they say; three defense experts are poised to testify.

Should he be required to stand trial — jury selection is scheduled to start October 26 — Jeffries would not understand the proceedings or be able to assist in his defense, his lawyers have said.

His dementia may even disrupt the trial, they argue.

Jeffries is prone to memory lapses and "inappropriate behavior" that could spill over into the courtroom, his lawyers warned in a court filing last year.

"He may blurt out self-incriminating statements or engage in erratic behavior, which would undermine his credibility and risk prejudicing the judge or jury against him," they wrote.

Prosecutors counter that Jeffries's condition has improved after more than four months of mental health treatment and evaluation at a federal correctional institution in Butner, North Carolina.

They plan to present testimony from three experts during the three-day hearing to prove he is now competent to stand trial.

They may also present some of more than 100 audio recordings of phone calls between Jeffries and his romantic partner, Matthew Smith — a co-defendant in the case — from Jeffries' time at Butner.

Prosecutors allege that Jeffries, Smith, and their employee, co-defendant James Jacobson, ran an international sex trafficking and prostitution business that targeted men who were young, financially insolvent, and eager to become models for the top brand.

The alleged victims were abused between 2008 and 2015 in a series of attacks at drug-fueled "sex events" across the US and at luxury hotels in Europe, Morocco, and Saint Barthelemy, according to a 2024 indictment.

Smith and Jacobson have also pleaded not guilty to the charges. All three are currently free on bail.

Jeffries earned "tens of millions of dollars per year" at the height of his career, prior to his retirement in 2014, according to prosecutors. He has posted $10 million bail.

Prosecutors have seized more than $11 million in cash from a trust fund controlled by Jeffries, according to court records.

All three defendants face a mandatory minimum 15-year sentence and as much as life in prison if convicted.

• Amid China's OpenClaw craze, the AI agent is now moving into robots.
• China's tech giants have begun launching their own versions of OpenClaw in the past weeks.
• Meanwhile, the US is still concerned about AI agents going rogue.

While much of the world is still experimenting with OpenClaw, China is already putting it into robots.

Chinese home robotics giant Ecovacs unveiled its new robot, Bajie, powered by OpenClaw, at a consumer electronics expo in Shanghai last week.

Advertised as a home "butler," the robot can perform household tasks such as tidying shoes or putting away toys.

Ecovacs founder Qian Dongqi said in an interview with Chinese outlet Ifeng that the long-term goal is for robots like Bajie to take on more household chores.

A writer from the Chinese tech outlet 36Kr who saw the robot in action reported that it required multiple prompts to complete tasks and "there were also unstable situations."

It's not just home robots. Developers have begun integrating OpenClaw into Chinese robot-maker Unitree's G1 humanoid robot, allowing it to interpret commands and navigate physical spaces in real time. A US-based team, Dimensional, has open-sourced the system behind these integrations.

Another Chinese company, AgileX Robotics, earlier this month published a guide showing how OpenClaw can be integrated with its robotic arm, letting users control the machine through natural language.

Chinese tech giant Xiaomi is also testing its version of OpenClaw across its ecosystem, from smartphones to smart home devices.

China has been gripped by an OpenClaw craze lately. Users rushed to install the AI agent on their devices, with some paying strangers to set it up for them and others forming long queues outside Tencent's Shenzhen headquarters and Baidu's Beijing office to get help from engineers.

The OpenClaw obsession is partly driven by the viral phrase "raising the lobster," which Chinese users use to describe deploying the AI agent to automate everyday tasks.

To meet the demand for AI agents, China's tech giants, including Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance, have begun launching their own versions of OpenClaw in the past few weeks.

US concerns about security

Meanwhile, in the US, concerns about AI agents going rogue continue to grow.

Last month, Meta's alignment director, Summer Yue, connected OpenClaw to her inbox, and said in an X post that the bot tried to delete her emails.

"I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb," Yue wrote on X.

In a separate incident, an AI agent set off a major internal security alert at Meta after acting without approval, exposing sensitive company and user data to staff who weren't authorised to see it, The Information reported on Thursday.

Tech leaders have also sounded alarms. Elon Musk last month posted an image of a monkey being handed a rifle on X, captioning it: "People giving OpenClaw root access to their entire life."

Even Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has praised the technology, has emphasized the need for stronger safeguards. His company is working on its own agent system, NemoClaw, with a focus on security.

• China's biggest tech names all want a piece of OpenClaw.
• Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, and others have launched versions of the AI agent and integrations.
• OpenClaw took China by storm in recent weeks as the phrase "raising the lobster" trended online.

The "lobster" craze in China has quickly turned into a corporate land grab.

Within weeks of OpenClaw gaining traction among developers and hobbyists, China's internet giants began rolling out their own versions of the AI agent and integrations.

Tencent launched QClaw last week, a tool that integrates OpenClaw into WeChat's vast ecosystem, China's super app. Users can send a message directly to QClaw via WeChat, and the agent will immediately execute the task, Tencent said on its website.

TikTok owner ByteDance's cloud unit, Volcano Engine, rolled out ArkClaw, a cloud-based version of OpenClaw accessible through a web browser. Alibaba also introduced JVS Claw, a mobile app designed to help users install and deploy OpenClaw more easily.

Xiaomi, a consumer electronics company, has launched a closed beta test of MiClaw, an AI agent that lets users control Xiaomi smartphones and smart home devices with single-sentence commands.

AI startups moved just as fast. Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax have released large language models or frameworks built on top of OpenClaw. Shares of Zhipu AI and MiniMax surged 13 per cent and 22 per cent respectively last Tuesday, following the announcements of their OpenClaw tools.

It's not just Chinese companies. Nvidia on Monday announced that it has created NemoClaw, an enterprise platform built on top of OpenClaw.

"It has a network guardrail, it has a privacy router, and as a result, we could protect and keep the claws from executing inside our company, and do it safely," CEO Jensen Huang said during Nvidia's 2026 GTC conference in San Jose on Monday.

"Every company in the world today needs to have an OpenClaw strategy, an agentic system strategy," he added. "This is the new computer."

OpenClaw has taken China by storm. The trending phrase "raising the lobster" went viral, as Chinese social media users used it to describe deploying the AI agent to automate everyday tasks.

People across China also rushed to install OpenClaw on their devices, forming queues outside Tencent's Shenzhen headquarters and Baidu's Beijing office to seek help from engineers. Others turned to online marketplaces, paying strangers to install the tool for them.

The frenzy has since been tempered by growing security concerns. In the past week, some users have begun removing the software — in some cases, even paying others to uninstall it.

Earlier in February, China's National Vulnerability Database, run by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, warned that the open-source agent could introduce security risks if not properly configured. Misconfigured deployments could leave systems exposed to cyberattacks or data breaches, it said.

Last week, Chinese government agencies and state-owned firms moved to curb the use of OpenClaw on work devices.

Do you have a story to share about tech in China? Contact this reporter at cmlee@businessinsider.com.

• Jeffrey Epstein victims and Bank of America reached a settlement in a class-action lawsuit.
• The terms haven't yet been publicly disclosed.
• JPMorgan paid $290 million and Deutsche Bank paid $75 million for similar lawsuit settlements.

Bank of America settled a proposed class-action lawsuit from Jeffrey Epstein accusers who alleged the bank facilitated the now-dead pedophile's sex-trafficking operation, court records show.

Lawyers for the bank and a group of Epstein accusers told the judge overseeing the case during a pretrial conference last week that they "reached a settlement in principle," according to a Monday update to the case's docket.

The terms of the settlement were not made public.

US District Judge Jed Rakoff, who is overseeing the case, gave a March 27 deadline for the parties to file public documents laying out the settlement's terms, and an April 2 hearing to decide whether to approve them.

"The women entrapped and abused by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell started a monumental reckoning with their brave voices and fearlessness," Sigrid McCawley, an attorney at Boies Schiller Flexner representing the Epstein accusers, said in a comment. "The road to justice for these women has been long and trying. Today's resolution of the case against Bank of America is one more step on the road to much deserved justice."

A representative for Bank of America declined to comment. In previous public statements and court filings, the bank denied wrongdoing.

The settlement scuttles a scheduled deposition for Leon Black, the billionaire ex-CEO of Apollo Global Management, which was set for March 26.

The accusers' lawsuit had alleged that Black's more than $150 million in transfers to Epstein — which Black has said was for financial and estate-planning services — facilitated Epstein's sex-trafficking. Bank of America should have paid closer attention to Black's accounts and any transactions related to Epstein, the lawsuit said.

Black has separately been asked to testify before the House Oversight Committee, which is investigating Epstein, on May 13.

JPMorgan agreed to pay $290 million, and Deutsche Bank agreed to a $75 million payout, to settle similar lawsuits brought by the same group of lawyers representing Epstein victims.

Rakoff previously tossed a parallel lawsuit the attorneys brought against BNY — formerly Bank of New York Mellon Corp. — but allowed portions of the case against Bank of America to move forward.

In an earlier court hearing, Rakoff said he would be disappointed if the cases against BNY and Bank of America didn't go to trial.

"I don't want to discourage you from settling," the judge said. "There are some of my colleagues that think settling is always the way to go. But I'm much more selfish and I would love to see two very good trials."

• Anthropic's Jeff Bleich says AI will end the billable hour's dominance in legal billing.
• Billable hours mean lawyers get paid more when they spend more time on work.
• But AI tools eliminate "tedious" work, which devalues the time lawyers spend overall, Bleich said.

The billable hour's time is approaching midnight, according to Anthropic's top lawyer.

"I don't think the billable hour is the solution, and we've known it for a long time," Jeff Bleich, the AI company's general counsel, said Thursday.

Speaking at the American Bar Association's White Collar Crime Institute in San Diego, Bleich said that artificial intelligence tools are eliminating the need for companies to hire armies of lawyers to do lucrative yet "tedious" work.

"Now we've got a technology that's going to eliminate the sorts of things that allow people to become wealthy off of tedious work," Bleich said on the panel, alongside top lawyers at Google, IBM, and Liberty Mutual. "That was not what lawyers are trained to do, and not what we ultimately look to lawyers for."

The much-maligned billable hour is the standard method that law firms use to bill their clients.

Attorneys track the work done for each client, often in six-minute increments, tally them up, and charge their clients accordingly.

While the billable hour has been useful to help companies and other clients understand what they are paying lawyers for, it has also "created a wedge," Bleich said.

Under the current system, "the interests of firms are at odds with the interests of their clients," he said. Companies want lawyers to resolve problems quickly, but law firms get paid more when the work takes longer.

"Clients want you to solve the problem as efficiently as possible and with as little drama as possible," Bleich said. "And if you're a company, the bigger the case gets, and the more dramatic it gets, and the more complicated it gets, and the more work that has to be done — the more lucrative it is."

The other panelists largely agreed with Bleich's remarks.

"The value is no longer you putting in time," said Damon Hart, the top lawyer at Liberty Mutual. "The value is your strategy, your results."

Anne Robinson, IBM's general counsel, told the audience that she's open to working with them to figure out more creative billing methods.

"I'm open to firms coming and saying, 'I'd really like to work with you on this matter or this type of work, I get that the billable hour model is not one of aligned incentives, and so let's sit down and talk about what you expect as far as outcomes and how we can both get there in a way that reflects your pressures and your priorities,'" Robinson said.

Bleich said he still values the work of outside law firms, but wants them to find an alternative to the billable hour that works for everyone.

"We're not going to sort of cheap out and starve you," Bleich said. "On the other hand, you have to have an economic model that works. And the firms that adapt to that faster and better will be leapfrogging other firms, because they'll be more attractive to work with."

Bleich's comments come at a critical moment for Anthropic, which sued federal agencies this week after the Trump administration effectively blacklisted it following the collapse of contract negotiations with the Department of Defense.

In the lawsuit, Anthropic is represented by WilmerHale, one of the law firms that Trump targeted last year with an executive order that was quickly blocked by a federal judge.

"I like firms that show some spine," Bleich said following the panel, when asked about using law firms that fought back against Trump's executive orders targeting them. He declined to comment on the lawsuit itself.

WilmerHale is distinguished in another way: Reginald Heber Smith, who in the early 20th century managed the Big Law firm — then called Hale and Dorr — is widely credited with inventing the billable hour.