Meet and Confer with Kelly Twigger

Disappearing messages feel like a convenience until a court treats them as spoliation. We walk through the Delaware Court of Chancery’s May 27, 2026 ruling from the N-Ray World Wrestling Entertainment merger litigation, where key executives used Signal and repeatedly shortened auto-delete windows after receiving explicit litigation holds. The decision is a masterclass in how timing drives everything: when the duty to preserve...

The evidence you need from an AI company might not be emails, chats, or a handful of prompt screenshots. It might be the machinery behind the product: the retrieval index, the operational database, and the logs that capture every interaction at scale. That shift changes what you ask for, how you scope it, and how you argue proportionality when the data volumes get huge. 

We walk through Encyclopedia Britannica and Merri...

Your case doesn’t have “documents.” It has a database full of everything a system ever generated and no sane way to collect or review it all. That’s the discovery problem generative AI is creating, and it’s why the Disney v Midjourney orders are worth reading line by line if you draft ESI protocols, negotiate protective orders, or litigate proportionality fights around prompt logs and AI outputs.

One disconnected Microsoft Teams message can look like evidence, but without the surrounding thread you can miss valuable context that can lead to additional evidence. We walk through Valcrum LLC v Dexter Axle Company LLC, a trademark and trade dress dispute that turns into a focused battle over Teams chat discovery, missing context, and what courts will actually order when keyword search fails on short form messaging.

We tr...

A party can run generative AI to decide what gets produced, and you still might not be able to “see inside” the process after the fact. That’s the gut punch and the practical lesson from Schulte v LinkedIn Corp. (N.D. Cal.), where plaintiffs tried to compel detailed transparency about LinkedIn’s Relativity AIR document review, including metrics like illusion estimates, document error rate, and how many human...

A new line just got crossed in e-discovery: a federal stipulated ESI protocol treats generative AI document review as its own governed process, and it requires disclosures many lawyers have spent years trying to protect. We walk through James v Cerebras Systems, where the parties agree to an AI-specific review appendix that demands documented workflows, human-confirmed privilege calls, audit trails, and prompt disclosure with rapid...

A Texas judge just gave litigators something they’ve been asking for and something they’ve been dreading: a clear ruling that litigation-related ChatGPT conversations can qualify as work product, paired with a warning flare about protective orders that never anticipated generative AI. We walk through Tate Group Automotive v Legacy Automotive Capital from the Business Court of Texas and explain why the analysis isn&rsquo...

Your expert uses generative AI to cut millions of documents down to something a human can actually read. Then the other side asks the question everyone has been dancing around: are the AI prompts and outputs discoverable? I walk through Conservation Law Foundation v Shell Oil Company (D. Conn.), where a magistrate judge answers “yes” and frames prompts as expert methodology under Rule 26, not some brand-new category of ...

A legal hold system that “works” can still wipe out the evidence you need, and you may not realize it until the sanctions motion lands. We unpack a major Rule 37(e) preservation decision from DDC in United States ex rel. Staggers v. Medtronic that every litigator, legal operations leader, and discovery counsel should study, especially if your company is migrating email or sitting under a long discovery stay. 

We break down Morgan v V2X, the most detailed federal ruling yet on generative AI, work product protection, and what happens when confidential discovery meets mainstream AI tools. We also track how Morgan fits with Heppner and Gilbarco and why the real fight is shifting toward protective orders, platform contracts, and access to justice. 

• why Morgan v V2X becomes a turning point for AI in civil discovery 
• the work produ...

A single analytics export can decide whether your damages story looks like math or guesswork. This week, we take on a spoliation decision out of the Southern District of New York that every litigator handling ESI should read, because the lost evidence is not email or chat logs. It’s Google Analytics website traffic data, the kind your marketing team lives in and your discovery plan might never mention until it’s too lat...

Two federal rulings issued the same week just redrew the map for AI, discovery, and privilege. We break down how Warner v. Gilbarco framed ChatGPT as a drafting tool and shielded a pro se litigant’s prompts and outputs, while U.S. v. Heppner denied privilege where a platform’s privacy policy allowed training and disclosure. The contrast is stark and deeply practical: facts, platform settings, and attorney involvement no...

The dramatic spoliation of evidence case of former NBA star Charles Oakley shows how failing to preserve text messages can severely damage litigation outcomes. Oakley's misrepresentations about his texting habits and phone upgrades led to substantial sanctions in his case against Madison Square Garden.

• Text messages are primary evidence in most litigation cases and must be preserved
• Charles Oakley's case against MSG was u...

Telling your client to “preserve their text messages” is not a preservation plan—and a new decision out of the District of Colorado makes that painfully clear.

In this episode of Meet and Confer, Kelly Twigger breaks down Peddada v. Catholic Health Initiatives Colorado, where a magistrate judge found intentional spoliation after key text messages went missing. Even without a forensic smoking gun, the court inferred...

Your chats are now your records. In this episode of Mobile Minutes sponsored by ModeOne Technologies, we dig into why mobile and off-channel messages—texts, WhatsApp, Signal, Slack, and Teams—have moved from “nice-to-have” discovery to core evidence and a core compliance obligation. With new DOJ and FTC guidance and eye-watering SEC penalties, regulators are no longer hinting; they’re spelling out what...

Everyone’s finally past the first question on hyperlinked documents: yes, they’re discoverable. That debate is over.

The real fight now is sharper—and it’s what makes the Carvana decision a must-read: when does a party have to produce a contemporaneous (point-in-time) version of a hyperlinked document, and what does the requesting party have to show to get that relief? Because in the cloud, the “attachm...

Think your AI prompts disappear when you hit delete? Not when litigation lands. We unpack the OpenAI copyright MDL to show how courts are turning ChatGPT conversation logs into core electronic evidence—preserved, sampled, de-identified, and produced under a protective order. The result is a clear, repeatable playbook for handling AI data at scale without letting privacy swallow relevance.

We walk through the emergency ...

We unpack how hyperlinked files and “modern attachments” change discovery, from Google Vault’s updates to Microsoft’s gaps, and how to defensibly restore parent–child context without breaking authenticity. Arman Gungor shares practical workflows for version selection, preservation, and rapid email fraud detection.

• Why links function as attachments in context
• Current limits of Google Vault...

Kelly Twigger, our Founder and CEO, just marked five years of weekly case analysis. This retrospective highlights what five key rulings from the past five years teach about discovery in practice and where litigators are being tested now.

This week’s episode isn’t a victory lap. It’s a grounded look at how ESI has reshaped litigation, what the decisions actually say, how judges are reasoning, and where counsel are g...