https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/ Legal analysis on energy law, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, insurance, and securities litigation from Phoenix attorney Arnold D. Lee. en-us https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/gc-brief-issue-04.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/gc-brief-issue-04.html Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT Issue No. 4 of The GC Brief: California's SB 690 ending private CIPA pen-register suits retroactively, SB 947 requiring human corroboration of AI-driven discipline, the FTC's Section 5 case over Amazon's sponsored ads auction, Delaware's amended privacy and breach-notification laws, the CPPA's data broker registration advisory, the Fifth Circuit on arbitration across a mixed insurer panel, two Eleventh Circuit Appointments Clause decisions, New York's climate superfund law held preempted, and the injunction against EPA's reclassification of California's Clean Air Act waivers. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/conooco-phillips-v-aogcc-ninth-circuit.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/conooco-phillips-v-aogcc-ninth-circuit.html Mon, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Ninth Circuit held that a federal statute authorizing Alaska's National Petroleum Reserve does not preempt the state's own confidentiality rules for well data. A company's federal lease-based confidentiality protections do not automatically travel with data independently submitted to state regulators. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/first-circuit-data-breach-standing.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/first-circuit-data-breach-standing.html Mon, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT The First Circuit affirmed dismissal of data breach claims but held that actual misuse of exposed personal information can itself establish Article III standing. What failed here was traceability: the plaintiff could not plausibly connect the alleged fraud to the hospital's data breach. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/homesite-v-united-airlines-crowdstrike.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/homesite-v-united-airlines-crowdstrike.html Mon, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT In the first publicly reported insurer-versus-insured coverage dispute from the July 2024 CrowdStrike outage, Homesite refuses to pay United Airlines's claim for passenger-compensation losses. The dispute illustrates how double recovery limitations, self-insured retentions, and passenger-compensation obligations interact inside a layered corporate cyber tower. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/openai-suicide-cases-mdl-leadership.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/openai-suicide-cases-mdl-leadership.html Mon, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT The coordination judge in California's ChatGPT Product Liability Cases appointed plaintiffs' leadership in August 2026, ending a competitive battle that preceded it. The contest matters more than the outcome: how a mass tort is organized at the outset shapes its discovery scope, settlement posture, and speed. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/gc-brief-issue-03.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/gc-brief-issue-03.html Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Issue No. 3 of The GC Brief: Meta's contingent settlement with 51 attorneys general, privileged AI bias testing in the Workday litigation, Spirit's sale of employee data to Google, New York's content-moderation disclosure law upheld, arbitration waiver in the Third Circuit, California on pre-exhaustion claims against excess insurers, the NAIC's AI Risk Evaluation Supplement, and NEPA after the CEQ rescission. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/gc-brief-issue-02.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/gc-brief-issue-02.html Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Issue No. 2 of The GC Brief: the Meta child-safety trial opens in Oakland, TikTok's $400 million COPPA settlement, Chancery dismisses the Boeing door-plug suit, AI models breach real companies during safety evaluations, the DPA-ordered Sable pipeline restart, health plan design as the fiduciary claim, the NLRB injunction split, IEEPA tariff refunds, the Dutch DPA's €825 million Uber fine, and NVIDIA's $105 billion guarantee. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/sixth-circuit-smucker-number-of-occurrences.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/sixth-circuit-smucker-number-of-occurrences.html Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT ACE American said J.M. Smucker's 2022 salmonella recall triggered 225 separate occurrences and $112.5 million in retained limits before coverage attached. The Sixth Circuit said one, applying Ohio's cause test and holding the policies' Lot Endorsement ambiguous. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/ohio-supreme-court-bad-faith-claim-file-discovery.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/ohio-supreme-court-bad-faith-claim-file-discovery.html Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Ohio Supreme Court held in Eddy v. Farmers that R.C. 2317.02, not the Boone bad-faith exception, governs discovery of an insurer's privileged claim file, with work product running on a separate track. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/fifth-circuit-most-reversed-scotus-term.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/fifth-circuit-most-reversed-scotus-term.html Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT For the third consecutive term, the Fifth Circuit was reversed more often than any other federal appellate court, with eight of eleven merits cases reversed or vacated in October Term 2025. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/state-ai-health-insurance-coverage-determinations.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/state-ai-health-insurance-coverage-determinations.html Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Between March and July 2026, at least seven states enacted laws restricting how health insurers, PBMs, and utilization review organizations use AI in coverage, prior authorization, and claims decisions. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/gc-brief-issue-01.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/gc-brief-issue-01.html Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Issue No. 1 of The GC Brief, a weekly newsletter for general counsel: the SEC filer-status proposal, the twelve-state Paramount-Warner Bros. suit, Loper Bright and preamble reliance, FASB ASU 2025-06 and AI costs, data-center VIEs, California's first Delete Act action, and the congressional inquiry into Chinese AI models. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/openai-meta-ai-models-autonomous-hacking.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/openai-meta-ai-models-autonomous-hacking.html Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic each disclosed AI models that autonomously hacked systems during cybersecurity testing in 2026, supplying verified fact patterns for negligence, CFAA, contractual, and AI-governance liability analysis. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/california-bar-ai-ethics-guidance-2026.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/california-bar-ai-ethics-guidance-2026.html Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT California's COPRAC has issued substantially updated 2026 guidance on generative and agentic AI in law practice, alongside a parallel effort to embed AI-specific obligations into binding rules of professional conduct. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/geofence-warrant-chatrie-v-united-states.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/geofence-warrant-chatrie-v-united-states.html Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Supreme Court's Chatrie ruling holds that geofence warrants implicate the Fourth Amendment, but leaves probable cause and particularity unresolved. What the decision means for corporate data retention and civil discovery. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/seventh-circuit-clearview-ai-settlement-vacated.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/seventh-circuit-clearview-ai-settlement-vacated.html Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Seventh Circuit vacated Clearview AI's novel equity-stake settlement because no representative negotiated for the Nationwide Class alone. What the ruling means for MDL settlement design. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/federal-rule-evidence-707-machine-generated-evidence.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/federal-rule-evidence-707-machine-generated-evidence.html Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Proposed FRE 707 would require unsponsored AI-derived evidence to meet Daubert-style reliability standards. Where the contentious rule stands after a year of committee wrangling. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/ai-litigation-trends-doar-report.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/ai-litigation-trends-doar-report.html Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT New DOAR data shows a sharp rise in AI-related federal litigation, concentrated heavily among a handful of frontier AI developers led by OpenAI. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/xai-minnesota-nudification-ban-first-amendment.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/xai-minnesota-nudification-ban-first-amendment.html Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT X.AI is suing Minnesota over its strict-liability AI "nudification" ban, arguing the law is a content-based speech restriction that cannot survive First Amendment scrutiny. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/prompts-and-production-chatbot-litigation.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/prompts-and-production-chatbot-litigation.html Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT AI prompts, outputs, and usage logs are ordinary ESI under the Federal Rules. What businesses need to know about preservation, privilege, and retention before litigation arrives. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/courts-begin-shielding-ai-prompts-discovery.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/courts-begin-shielding-ai-prompts-discovery.html Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT New York and Texas become the first jurisdictions to recognize work-product protection for AI-assisted litigation prompts and outputs, with important limits for waiver and testifying experts. https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/lessons-shale-data-center-land-rush.html https://www.arnoldleelaw.com/articles/lessons-shale-data-center-land-rush.html Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Lease drafting, severed-estate title risk, permitting, and boom-bust lessons from the shale era for lawyers navigating the data-center land rush.