Below you'll find a list of all posts from 2026
Summary When your business files a lawsuit, an early ruling from the judge can change the entire course of the case. If that ruling goes against you, it may be tempting to look for the fastest way to get in front of the Court of Appeal. A recent California Supreme Court decision shows why one shortcut, voluntarily dismissing your case …
A California Court of Appeal sanctioned an attorney $1,500 and forwarded its opinion to the State Bar after his brief quoted cases that do not exist, quotations generated by AI and never verified. The lawyer had an AI policy requiring human review. The court held the policy itself was not enough, because it never put a competent person on the …
If you’re defending a lawsuit and the plaintiff drops it, then files somewhere else and drops it again, you’d be forgiven for thinking the matter is finished. There’s even a federal rule that seems to promise as much. The California Supreme Court just made clear that the two-dismissal rule doesn’t reach nearly as far as many defendants assume. In Doe …
Here’s the trade every developer knows. A CEQA categorical exemption means no environmental impact report, no months of study, no public comment cycle. You show your project fits an exempt category, and you move. A unanimous California Supreme Court just rewrote the argument you have to make to claim one of the most common of those exemptions, and if you’ve …
A worker dies on the job. A state safety agency wants to know what happened. You believe that worker was an independent contractor rather than your employee, so you decide the agency has no business in your files and you refuse its subpoena. A California appellate court just explained, in unsparing terms, why that decision is a trap. The case …
If your business relies on generative AI to produce work that gets filed, sent, or signed under your name, a California appellate court just answered the question that matters: when the output is wrong, who pays? Not the software. Not the contractor who ran it. You. That’s the lesson of Quinteros v. Harbor Distributing, LLC (Cal. Ct. App., 1st Dist., …