This edition features themed articles on "Technology's Effect on Advocacy."
Technology’s Effect on Advocacy
September/October 2026 Edition
Volume 56, Number 5 • September/October 2026
Contents
03 06
Notes from Team CAOC
Special thank yous and what to expect from this edition
FORUM (ISSN:0889-7751) is published digitally 6 times a year. Entire contents ©2026 Consumer Attorneys Of California. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or part without permission of CAOC is prohibited. Statements and opinions in editorials and articles are not necessarily those of CAOC. Publication of advertising does not imply endorsement of products or services. Advertisers and their agencies are solely responsible and assume full liability for all contents of their advertisements. All letters and materials sent to FORUM will be considered CAOC property. Any editorial or article copy accepted is subject to such revision as is deemed proper in the discretion of the editor. Acceptance of editorial or article copy includes the author’s rights to such copy. Publisher reserves the right to publish, in whole or part, all letters received. Email forum@caoc.org with questions or to inquire about article submissions, advertising space. Consumer Attorneys Of California 770 L Street, Suite 1200 Sacramento, CA 95814-3396
Upcoming Events, Programs
A quick look at in-person or virtual opportunities
08 “The Work You Did Not See”
President’s Message by Douglas Saeltzer
09 “Legislative Update”
By CAOC Legislative Director, Nancy Peverini 12 “The Case for Human Beings in the AI Era: The Employment Lawyer Perspective” Co-authored by Alexis Gamliel and Carlen Don 16 “How Legal Technology Can Strengthen a Lawyer’s Judgment Without Replacing It” Authored by F. Edie Mermelstein 24 “The Settings Nobody Changed: Protecting Your Firm and Data from CyberAttacks” Authored by Mark Mina 28 “When AI Writes the Police Report: What Plaintiffs’ Attorneys Need to Know” Authored by Denisse Gastélum 34 “Tips for Introducing, Challenging Evidence from Archived Internet Sources such as the Wayback Machine” Authored by Jason A. Ibey 38 “My Client’s Other Lawyer Is ChatGPT: What Attorneys Need to Know When Clients Turn to AI” Authored by Jade M. Brewster 45 “The Remote Deposition Coaching Problem, and the Case for a Formal Rule” Authored by Scott E. Boyer 54 “The Legal Tech Shift Plaintiff Firms Can't Afford to Miss: Agentic AI in Complex Litigation” Authored by John Blake 58 “When Harm Is Invisible: Litigating AI and EdTech Claims in California Classrooms” Authored by Micha Star Liberty 66 “Five Hours for a Sheet of Pleading Paper: What I Learned When I Stopped Waiting for the Legal
77 Advocates Club Listing Spotlighting our contributors 84 Business Friends listing Spotlighting our top partners 85 “(Legislator) Summer Dreamin’ 87 “Creating a Seat at the Table” DEI Report by Shalini Quattlebaum 88 “Coffee Break Report” 90 “Women’s Caucus Report” By Ji-In Houck 93 “A Busy Fall” 95 President’s Club listing
By Grassroots Manager, Natalie Robertson
Legal Staff Support Group report by Assal Badrkhani, Cesar Garcia
New Lawyers Division report by Matt Sahak
Tech Industry to Save Me” Authored by Benjamin Schenk
Spotlighting the firms and people supporting the organization
72 76
2026 Award Finalists Consumer Attorney, Street Fighter of the Year nominees
97 Membership Report 98 Affiliate Listing
A current look at our numbers, top recruiters
“How Dramatically Would Things Have Changed? PAC Board Chair Message by Roger Dreyer
Directory of all our vendor partners
Notes from the Team
About the Edition
By Julie Gossett
A special thank you to Iliana Demas , our summer intern, for assisting in collecting and reviewing articles and providing feedback on this edition. Your future is bright, and your edits were greatly appreciated. To get more involved in Forum or to inquire about advertising opportunities, reach out to forum@caoc.org. Happy reading!
Welcome to another edition of Forum Magazine. As always, we aim to provide a mix of articles to help you learn something new, approach your practice from a different angle, or simply get to know more of your colleagues. For our September/October 2026 issue, we focus on “Technology’s Effect on Advocacy.” You will find practical articles with tips and tricks leveraging technology. You will also find articles presenting challenges and dilemmas technology introduces to consumer advocacy. Both perspectives offer a look into what it means to advocate in 2026 and beyond. In addition to our themed articles, take the time to read messages from Nancy Peverini, Legislative Director, Roger Dreyer , PAC Board Chair, and Natalie Robertson , Grassroots Manager. They provide a fantastic look into CAOC’s legislative, political, and grassroots efforts and needs. As we inch closer to the 65 Annual Convention, this edition also features the penultimate President’s Message from Doug Saeltzer and reports from our committee chairs. It is a bittersweet time at CAOC as we prepare to pass the gavel and usher in new leadership across our executive committee, board of directors, and committee chairs. th It’s also a busy time. As I am writing this, Governor Newsom is signing bills (including CAOC-sponsored bills). Teams are actively phone banking to spread awareness on pro-consumer, CAOC-endorsed candidates as we head to election season. Membership teams are helping us get closer to our 5,000 goal, and we are on track to break another Convention attendance record. If you would like to get more involved and help, reach out to member@caoc.org. Our team is here for you.
4 - Robert W. Johnson & Associates 5 - Greene, Broillet, Wheeler LLP 56 - Baldwin Settlements 10 - Bisnar Chase 11 - EvenUp Law 15 - Judicate West 18 - Arias Sanguinetti Wang & Team LLP 22 - Esquire Bank 23 - Richard Harris Law Firm 26 - Shernoff Bidart Echeverria LLP 27 - Supio 33 - Lawyers for Justice 36 - ADR Services, Inc. 37 - Rockpoint Legal Funding 41 - USA Express Legal & Investigative Services, Inc 44 - Steno 48 - Eve.Legal 52 - Physician Life Care Planning 53 - Greenberg & Ruby 57 - Riley Ersoff Rodas LLP 65 - Signature Resolution 68 - Alternative Resolution Centers (ARC) Thank you for the support! ADVERTISING INDEX
Consumer Attorneys of California
Oct 1, 2026 CAOIE Judges Night Riverside, CA COMING UP SOON @ CAOC
Oct 7, 2026 SMCTLA Judges Night Redwood City, CA
Oct 22, 2026 Mixer @ Bungalow Santa Monica, CA
Nov 12-15, 2026 65 Annual Convention, th San Francisco, CA
Nov 14, 2026 Installation, Awards San Francisco, CA
Above: Rahul Ravipudi, Erika Contreras during 2025 CAOC Conversation recordings. Below: Shanna Hesketh, Bibi Fell, Jessica Dayton, Melissa Baldwin, Lauren Cerri at the 2025 Women’s Caucus Triall Skills Session hosted during the Annual Convention.
Nov 30 - Dec 2, 2026 Hawaii Seminar Maui, HI March 13 - 17, 2027 Napa Sonoma Seminar Sonoma, CA
Above: Nancy Peverini, Jacquie Serna, and Saveena Takhar, CAOC Advocates, in Sacramento, August 2026.. Below: Chris Dolan at the 2025 Annual Convention.
Upcomings Events & Programs
Get Involved with a Committee! Our committee meetings are held online, and all CAOC members are invited to get involved. Check out the live Calendar of Events to see what’s next, and email the CAOC team member listed as point of contact to add a meeting to your calendar.
Sept 30, 2026 Accredited Webinar* State of Discovery in San Mateo County: A View from the Bench Hosted by SMCLTA JOIN US ONLINE Oct 13, 2026 Accredited Webinar* Voir Dire Techniques to Pick the Right Jury for Your Case Hosted by CAOC
Dec 16, 2026 Online Meeting Lunch and Learn with the Legal Staff Support Group Hosted by LSSG
The Consumer Attorneys of California is a State Bar of California approved MCLE provider (#00324). Be sure to check online for information regarding credits offerred for these programs. Reach out to education@caoc.org with any questions about our accredited programs.
We hope to see you there!
Amy Martel, Geoff Wells, Kipp Mueller at the November 2025 Board of Directors meeting.
President’s Message
The Work You Did Not See By Douglas Saeltzer
Our members measure a year in verdicts. This year, the most consequential work done on behalf of our clients happened in rooms with no gallery, no court reporter, and no jury. One legislator told me that in thirty-six years in and around the Capitol, he had never seen a session that mattered more to CAOC members and to victims. He was not talking about what passed. He was talking about what almost did. Let me be candid about something uncomfortable. We have lost the narrative with many legislators. We do not walk into those offices as the people who stand between an injured child and the institution that failed her. We walk in as trial lawyers. That impression is being actively constructed: in August, a coalition of more than two hundred public agencies told the Legislature in writing that plaintiffs' firms are the single largest beneficiaries of the system, and that Californians pay a "lawsuit tax" on nearly everything they buy. What reached print this year was no adjustment at the margins. One measure would have rewritten the Government Claims Act top to bottom: a $250,000
cap on noneconomic damages and $500,000 on economic damages against public entities, a blanket immunity for any injury arising from a "governmental function," including funding, staffing and oversight decisions, and several rather than joint liability for economic damages. Alongside it came sweeping limits on wildfire survivors' claims, new restrictions on construction defect recovery, and a broad push for damage and fee caps in both public entity and child sexual abuse cases. Read that against your own inventory. The pedestrian killed by a city vehicle. The student assaulted by a coach the district had been warned about. None of the caps became law. The blanket immunity did not survive. The broadest wildfire proposals collapsed before the deadline. That was not luck. It was five people who read every bill and every amendment, who knew which member would take a call on a Sunday, who could explain in ninety seconds why "several liability" means a paralyzed nineteen- year-old collects nothing, and who built a coalition that included the ACLU, Consumer Watchdog, the Youth Law Center and over 50 other groups so legislators heard the argument from voices beyond our own. Nancy Drabble, our CEO, oversaw all of it, as she has overseen every fight this organization has had for decades. Nancy Peverini, our Legislative Director. Lea Ann Tratten, our Political Director. Saveena Takhar, our General Counsel. Jacquie Serna, our Policy Director.
Douglas S. Saeltzer is the 2026 CAOC President. He is a shareholder with Walkup, Melodia, Kelly & Schoenberger whose main office is in San Francisco, CA. Doug focuses on resolving large cases on behalf of seriously injured people by way of trial or settlement.
dsaeltzer@walkuplawoffice.com
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It was not a clean sweep. As it now stands, pending signature by the Governor, we gave ground in two places. The child sexual abuse compromise imposes a heightened evidentiary burden on survivors over forty. And a public entity must now be found more than 15 percent at fault before it is jointly and severally liable for economic damages. But in light of the threats, it was a clear victory for victims.
Keep in mind, this threat does not expire. It returns in January with better sponsors and a longer list of signatures. When our legislative team asks you for a client story, for testimony, for a call to your representative, understand what you are being asked to support. Not an abstraction. The five people standing between that agenda and your clients. Thank you to them, and to all of you.
Legislative Update
By Nancy Peverini
The 2025-2026 legislative session ended this first week of September, 2026. What a whirlwind. What a year. What a massive effort to protect our clients and our profession. What a win. A final legislative report will be completed in time for CAOC’s November convention, but I wanted to share the highlights of this extraordinarily challenging year. Your legislative advocates are extremely proud to say that, with the help of CAOC’s tremendous leadership, we successfully defeated multiple tort reform attempts, including: Negotiations which led to the withdrawal of the Uber initiative, which would have imposed attorney fee caps and limited access to medical care; A $510,000 non-economic damage cap for all public entity cases and childhood sexual assault cases; An attempt to require that a public entity be found more than 75% at fault for joint and several economic damages to apply;
Fee caps for plaintiffs in fire cases;
Limits on the right to bring a private action under the California Invasion of Privacy Act; and,
Severe limits on the rights of homeowners to sue for construction defects.
The CAOC advocates (Nancy Drabble, CEO, Lea- Ann Tratten, Political Director, Jacquie Serna, Policy Director, Saveena Takhar, General Counsel and me, Nancy Peverini, Legislative Director) want to thank you for your support during this difficult year.
A $150,000 cap on non-economic damages for smoke and ash damage cases’
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The Case for Human Beings in the AI Era: The Employment Lawyer Perspective By Alexis R. Gamliel, Carlen L. Don
First and foremost, a message to the reader: The entirety of this article was concocted and drafted by the authors themselves—not by any AI agent, platform, or program. The content you are about to read is completely authentic, not artificial. At CAOC, our mission is simple: seeking justice for all. The hallmark of our civil justice system is the human element; there is nothing artificial about trying a case to a jury, giving a client her day in court, and securing justice. The pursuit of justice by jury trial is as real as it gets; and it must be done by a human, for a human. When it comes to seeking and securing justice for individuals who have been wronged, while artificial intelligence (“AI”) may be used responsibly in the backdrop of a case, the human element shines— and should remain—at center stage. This is one of the many reasons why, behind the scenes, although we can and should harness AI ethically for efficiency (and sometimes, for creativity support), we cannot lose sight of the bedrock of our justice system, which is our humanity. After all, human beings appear in court. Human beings advocate, they try cases.
Human beings are our plaintiffs. Human beings are the heartbeat of our justice system. And so, why would we defer all of the building blocks of a case, or of a plaintiffs’ law firm, to AI? Why would we relinquish a critical part of our power as attorneys for the people who need us? From the employment attorney vantage point, this article will explore two main arenas where we must maintain a firm grasp on our humanity: (1) in the courts, specifically while in trial and preparing for trial; and (2) in the culture of our workplaces. We will address the importance of hiring real people versus outsourcing everything to AI, to perform the work. This article will expound upon the value-add that humans with heart bring to the profession (how humans can intelligently and compassionately relate to clients, which AI cannot do), as well as the value to the business/firm and society as a whole for things like interpersonal relationships, “paying it forward” by training the next generation of attorneys and legal staff, and more.
Alexis Gamliel is the CEO, Founder & Principal Trial Attorney of Gamliel Law, based in Los Angeles. Handling both employment and personal injury matters, Alexis maintains a particular emphasis on representing employees in sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination, and whistleblower cases. She is the 2026 Treasurer serving the CAOC Executive Committee. alexis@gamliellaw.com
Carlen Don is an Attorney at Gamliel Law, where she represents California employees who have been wronged in the workplace. Carlen takes pride in standing up against corporations and public entities in matters of discrimination, retaliation, wrongful termination, harassment, and wage and hour violations. carlen@gamliellaw.com
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can respond to opposing counsel’s argument with a quick quip on the fly. We have to stay ready and mentally fit for the fight.
This article explores these issues from the lens of law firm owner and trial lawyer, Alexis Gamliel, and attorney Carlen Don, both of Gamliel Law, P.C.
Humanity in the Culture of Our Workplaces
Humanity in the Courts
Given the nuances and considerations attendant to employing humans in California, why not outsource work to AI tools that do not require meal and rest breaks, protected leaves (e.g., related to pregnancy and childbirth), or generous salaries? With everything AI can do today, and the promise of what AI can do tomorrow, why hire humans? We have distilled it down to four primary factors driving the case for human beings: The Human Connection: Humans can intelligently and compassionately relate to clients and each other (supporting strong intra- and inter- firm collaboration), which AI cannot come close to emulating. The Collective Experience: Teams of people (including attorneys, paralegals, and other legal staff roles) with different academic and professional experience, as well as diverse cultures and backgrounds, bring a value-add which AI cannot provide. The Value to the Firm: People create energy and make up the space in which the work is done. Plus, more people means more touch-points in the community and an increased presence; this translates to greater access to justice because people are accessible to potential clients and to other firms who practice in other areas.
We practice how we perform. If we practice connecting with humans, we will show up better equipped to try cases to humans, to dig deeper into our clients’ stories so that we can tell them effectively, with genuine care, concern, and connection. Clients’ stories unfold and are told in our conference rooms, in our clients’ homes, in conversations where someone who experienced a trauma feels a sense of trust and is willing to open up and share. We cannot discover the layered impact of a wrongful termination, a series of racial epithets, or a sexual harassment incident until these walls come down. Those conversations should happen early and often, so that we embody our role as trusted counsel, armed to carry the story of a person who was wronged. We cannot expect machines to gather all of the data, cull all of the evidence, and put together paperwork that does the client’s story justice. That requires heavy lifting and developing trust over time—by humans—from the initial intake call, to discovery meetings, to deposition preparation, to mediation preparation, to performance in trial. And, call us cynical, but we believe clients are craving the personal connection now more than ever, as technology encroaches on every aspect of our daily lives—from AI agents answering phone calls, to AI programs designed to assemble discovery responses, and more. The client wants and deserves human connection. Once we, as attorneys, step into court (whether for a hearing or for trial), there is no deferring to a robot who can think on our feet for us or an AI agent who
The Value to Society: There is no doubt technology has transformed the way we practice
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Human-to-human connection with opposing counsel is a skill that must be practiced, over and over again, not only for our own well-being as advocates but also to advance our cases and so that our positive interactions and relationships inure to our clients’ benefit. We cannot spend the day solely interacting with AI tools or using AI platforms to crank out lengthy meet-and-confer letters and then expect to remember how to interact with opposing counsel. We must push ourselves and encourage our team members to pick up the phone or set a videoconference with opposing counsel and have real conversations that move the needle. These intelligent, civil conversations bear even more potency when more and more professionals are viewing written work product with skepticism because of AI’s prevalence. Live conversations are an opportunity to flex our power, hash out issues efficiently, and take temperatures on meaningful resolution short of trial.
law. While technology evolves (R.I.P., Word Perfect and manual dictations) the art of storytelling and passing down best practices and war stories remains invaluable.
The Human Connection
The culture is the cure. The law firm lifestyle should not suffer or wither away because of the advent of AI. People, including our teams, crave a sense of belonging, of being a part of something bigger. This is precisely why we should not defer entire firm operations to AI. From Alexis’s vantage point as a firm owner and founder, when hiring attorneys and legal staff, she sees the value in assembling a team of human beings with heart—for purposes of curating a dynamic, thoughtful, and engaged workforce. That is not only what our clients need today; it is what makes for a meaningful career and daily life, pursuing justice for people. Legal teams who combine compassion and experience with the savvy and ethical use of AI will be the most formidable forces today. Especially with the overwhelming concentration of wealth and power among certain corporations and individuals, we owe it to ourselves and to our clients to double down on our people, while embracing technology at the same time. When it comes to building and working in a firm that values real people, the limits are endless. While AI may be utilized for tasks like (securely) summarizing voluminous records or synthesizing documents produced, we cannot and should not outsource it all to technology.
The Collective Experience
Having human colleagues versus AI chat-bots also provides camaraderie and fulfillment at work. A human brain is inarguably more creative, unique, and fun to have around as a coworker! Nothing beats a lively debate in the conference room with fellow attorneys and legal staff on litigation strategy or next steps. Each team member’s unique background and experience add perspective to the conversation, in a manner AI cannot achieve.
The Value to the Firm
Firm culture stems from the people that make up the workplace and the leaders who set the tone and drive the spirit of the firm. A high-energy, positive workplace cannot be created by AI. Hiring human staff to your law firm may also increase case results,
A Note on Civility
Just like any other skill, civility is a strength we must exercise, or we risk the muscle atrophying.
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Technology’s Effect on Advocacy staff, investing in their success, and taking a vested interest as they do their part in the collective fight for justice. Building a strong roster of law firm teammates provides the invaluable opportunity to seek justice on a larger scale.
help you retain even more righteous cases, and elevate the reputation of your firm. Each human in your firm provides another touch-point to the community. The embedded network of each individual creates a new and valuable resource for the firm. Employees maintain their own circles of friends, family, former colleagues, teammates, and other community members who may eventually find themselves in need of representation or know someone else who does.
The AI Question Is an Access-To-Justice Question
In an era when access to justice is constantly under attack, it is now more important than ever for us to cling to our humanity like civil justice depends on it. Because it does. The minute we hand over control to the robots is the moment we hand over our power— our own power as advocates, and by extension, that of California consumers and employees.
The Value to Society
In addition to providing benefits to the firm, hiring human team members also adds value to society as a whole. We have all had legal mentors who have been instrumental in our careers or practice. The law firm is also a place where we can pay it forward to the next generation by training up rising attorneys and legal
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How Legal Technology Can Strengthen a Lawyer’s Judgment Without Replacing It By F. Edie Mermelstein
I did not go to law school because I had always dreamed of becoming a lawyer. I went to law school because I had been a plaintiff. Before I entered the profession, I learned what it meant to place my life, my credibility, and my future in the hands of the legal system. I obtained a jury award against a defendant whose conduct had profoundly affected me. When he later attempted to discharge that judgment in bankruptcy, I refused to accept that the verdict could simply disappear. I immersed myself in bankruptcy and appellate law, worked through the record, and drafted my own appeal. Before I ever attended law school, that effort resulted in my first published opinion. The district court reversed the bankruptcy court’s discharge ruling, held the judgment nondischargeable, and overturned sanctions that had been imposed against me and my counsel. The Ninth Circuit later affirmed and adopted the district court’s published opinion. That experience did more than lead me toward a legal career. It taught me that a court can reach the right result only when the advocate gives it the record, the law, and a reliable path connecting the two.
By the time I arrived at law school, I had already been formed by appellate practice. As a certified law student, I worked on numerous appellate matters, drafted briefs in the Ninth Circuit and California’s Fourth District Court of Appeal, and then argued before the Fourth District while I was still a student. Early in my practice, the second case I took brought me to the United States Supreme Court, where I sat second chair on October 6, 2015. Since then, I have continued to work on appeals and writs and have been fortunate to obtain multiple published opinions. Appellate work did not merely teach me how to write appellate briefs. It taught me how to practice law. It made me conscientious about preserving objections, making offers of proof, authenticating exhibits, identifying the applicable standard of review, and ensuring that the trial court has a complete and accurate record on which to rule. It also taught me that every citation is a representation of personal integrity. When a judge follows a citation, the court is not merely checking a page number. It is deciding whether the lawyer can be trusted. That lesson has become even more important as legal research has moved from libraries, to Westlaw and Lexis, and now to artificial intelligence.
F. Edie Mermelstein is the founder of FEM Law Group, P.C., where her practice focuses on financial elder abuse, special needs trusts, conservatorships, and complex probate, trust, civil, and appellate litigation. She represents individuals, families, and fiduciaries in matters involving vulnerable adults, contested assets, and fiduciary disputes. She also serves as President of the Auschwitz Study Foundation, Inc., dedicated to Holocaust education and preservation.
Tools Have Changed; the Responsibility Has Not
Legal research once required a physical relationship with the law. We went to libraries, pulled reporters from shelves, traced authorities through printed volumes, and Shepardized cases by hand. That process was inefficient by today’s standards, but it
edie@femlawyers.com
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accelerate reasoning. It cannot assume professional responsibility.
imposed discipline. You could not casually claim that a case stood for a proposition without locating the opinion, reading it, and checking what happened to it afterward. As a law student, I became addicted to Boolean searching. I loved the precision of it. One additional connector, proximity term, or factual phrase could uncover a case that a broader search had missed. Westlaw and Lexis transformed the research landscape. They made it possible to locate authorities faster, identify negative treatment more efficiently, and explore lines of precedent that once would have required hours of manual research. Yet Westlaw and Lexis never relieved lawyers of the responsibility to read the cases. A headnote could point me in the right direction, but it could not tell me whether the language came from the holding, dicta, a concurrence, or a party’s argument. A red or yellow flag could warn me that a decision had been criticized or limited, but it could not determine whether that treatment affected the proposition for which I intended to cite it. The platform assisted my research. It did not exercise my judgment. Artificial intelligence is the next stage of that evolution. It can search, summarize, compare, organize, and generate with breathtaking speed. It can identify authorities addressing an emerging issue, locate recurring themes in hundreds of pages of testimony, or compare multiple opinions in seconds. Those capabilities are enormously valuable to plaintiff’s lawyers, particularly those practicing against institutions and defense firms with far greater resources.
How I Actually Use AI to Brief Motions
I do sometimes ask Westlaw’s AI tools or another research platform to suggest cases on a developing issue. That is an increasingly useful part of modern research. A well-framed question may surface an authority I would not have found through my first Boolean search, especially where the terminology is evolving or different courts describe the same issue in different ways.
But a suggested case is not a verified case, and an AI summary is not legal analysis.
Once a potentially relevant authority appears, I pull the opinion. I read it. I examine the facts, the procedural posture, the standard of review, and the precise language of the holding. I check whether later cases have limited, distinguished, or questioned it. Only then do I decide whether it belongs in my argument. After I identify the cases that matter, I often feed the actual opinions back into AI. That is where the technology becomes especially useful. I may ask it to compare several cases, identify where their reasoning converges, isolate meaningful factual distinctions, or explain whether my proposed rule is broader than the authorities support. I may ask which case opposing counsel is most likely to rely upon, whether the cases reveal a split in analytical approach, or whether a recent decision changes how an older case should be understood.
I do not merely ask AI to confirm that I am right. I ask it to tell me why I may be wrong. Some of my
But AI is not the next generation of legal judgment. It is the next generation of legal tools. Technology can
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most useful prompts are variations of the same questions I have always asked myself: Does this case really stand for that proposition? What is the strongest authority against me? What language have I ignored? Is my characterization fair? What factual distinction will the other side exploit? What am I missing? AI is remarkably useful when it is asked to challenge an argument rather than flatter it. It can function as a relentless second reader. It will compare the same five cases repeatedly, examine a deposition from another angle, or test whether a factual assertion is supported by the material provided. It does not become tired, impatient, or emotionally attached to the theory of the case. But it can also be wrong. It can misstate a holding, omit limiting language, confuse one witness’s testimony with another’s, or generate a persuasive sentence unsupported by any source. That is why I never treat its output as the final answer. I return to the opinion, the transcript, the exhibit, or the filed record every time. The source controls. The lawyer decides.
elder-abuse case may turn on a series of transactions that appear innocuous when viewed separately but reveal exploitation when placed in chronological and relational context. A rideshare sexual-assault case may involve app data, account records, communications, prior incidents, corporate policies, witness testimony, and evidence of what the company knew or should have known. In both settings, critical facts can be buried in thousands of pages of documents. The plaintiff’s lawyer must do more than tell a compelling story. We must build a record that permits the court to find that story in admissible evidence. We must identify the governing legal principles without overstating them. We must preserve issues before the moment of appellate review. We must anticipate that a defendant will challenge not only our legal theory, but the credibility of our client and the reliability of our presentation.
For vulnerable clients, accuracy is not a technical exercise. It is protection.
Every pristine pincite reduces the opportunity for distraction. Every precise record citation allows the court to verify an important fact without searching through an entire exhibit. Every fair description of adverse authority strengthens the court’s confidence that the lawyer is presenting the law rather than manipulating it. Plaintiff’s lawyers do not always have the largest teams or the greatest budgets. But we can know the record better. We can understand the cases more deeply. We can make it easier for the court to trust us. Credibility remains one of the profession’s greatest equalizers.
Why This Matters in Plaintiff-Side Practice
My practice now focuses substantially on financial elder abuse and the difficult issues embedded in representing older adults and other vulnerable individuals. I have also done significant work in the rideshare sexual-assault arena. These cases involve more than complicated facts. They involve power imbalances, trauma, cognitive changes, family dynamics, fiduciary relationships, financial records, medical histories, and institutions that often have a strategic interest in questioning the plaintiff’s credibility. When a client is already vulnerable, the lawyer cannot afford to be careless. A financial
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A Citation Is a Promise
sentence. If the case does not support the full proposition, I narrow the proposition or find better authority. That process may produce a less dramatic sentence. It produces a stronger brief.
I regard every citation as a promise to the court. It says: if you spend your time checking my work, you will find what I represented. That means the authority must support the precise proposition for which it is cited. It is not enough that the case discusses the general subject. It is not enough that a headnote appears useful. It is not enough that an AI tool produces a quotation and page number. I open the opinion. I verify the quoted language. I read the surrounding paragraphs. I determine whether the statement was necessary to the decision, whether it was limited by the facts, and whether the court later qualified it. I confirm the pincite and check the subsequent history. The same discipline applies to the record. A citation to a declaration should direct the court to the relevant paragraph, not merely the entire document. A deposition citation should accurately reflect the testimony at the cited page and line. A factual statement should not convert a witness’s uncertainty into a definitive admission or transform an expert’s qualified opinion into an absolute conclusion. One of the easiest ways to lose credibility is to write a factual narrative from memory and add citations afterward. Memory inevitably compresses, simplifies, and sometimes improves the evidence. The record may be more complicated. The testimony may contain a qualification. The document may support only part of the sentence. For that reason, I try to draft from the source. I attach record support while writing rather than treating citations as a final clerical step. If the evidence does not support the sentence as written, I revise the
Making the Record Is Part of the Brief
My appellate background makes me approach trial- court briefing with the expectation that the record may one day be reviewed by someone who was not present when the events occurred. That expectation affects more than writing. It affects how I litigate the case from the beginning. Was the objection made clearly and on the correct ground? Was the excluded evidence identified through an adequate offer of proof? Was the exhibit authenticated? Did the court rule? Is the ruling reflected in the minute order or transcript? Did the briefing present the issue in a form that permits meaningful review? If emergency relief was sought, does the record show why the harm could not await ordinary notice? These questions are not reserved for appellate lawyers. Every trial lawyer creates an appellate record, whether intentionally or not. My willingness to take issues to the mat comes from understanding that unresolved ambiguity rarely helps the vulnerable client. If an issue matters, I want it fully researched, clearly presented, and properly preserved. That does not mean turning every disagreement into unnecessary combat. It means knowing when the point is legally consequential and refusing to abandon it merely because the path is difficult. A recent published opinion arising from one of my trust cases illustrates both aspects of that responsibility. In Young v. Hartford , the Court of
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I identify the actual sources of authority and evidence. Research platforms and AI may help locate them, but I obtain and review the underlying opinions, statutes, transcripts, declarations, exhibits, and orders. I test the proposition against the source. I ask whether the case or record supports the exact sentence, not merely its general subject. I verify every quotation and pincite. I compare the language to the original and read enough surrounding material to understand the context. I check the authority’s current status. Significant authorities are Shepardized or KeyCited, and any limiting or adverse treatment is evaluated rather than ignored. I ask AI to attack the brief. I use it to identify unsupported assertions, overlooked distinctions, inconsistent dates, adverse authority, and arguments the opposition is likely to make. I review the final filing version. The PDF submitted to the court, not the Word document, is the operative brief. Pagination, hyperlinks, quotation marks, tables, exhibits, and internal references must all survive conversion.
The technology does not sign the filing. I do.
Appeal addressed a novel or nearly novel issue involving the appealability of orders suspending trustees and appointing interim trustees. The court published the decision to provide a clear answer. The same opinion also addressed counsel’s communications and emphasized that civility is a professional requirement, not simply a matter of etiquette. The two subjects are more connected than they first appear. Making a complete record sometimes requires challenging improper conduct. But taking an issue to the mat does not require surrendering professionalism. Advocacy can be tenacious and civil at the same time. In fact, disciplined advocacy is often more persuasive because it keeps the focus on the law, the evidence, and the client rather than on unnecessary personal conflict.
The Sanction-Proof Workflow
These steps do not eliminate judgment. They force the lawyer to exercise it repeatedly.
No lawyer can guarantee that a brief is literally immune from challenge or sanctions. I use the phrase “sanction-proof” to describe a disciplined process designed to eliminate avoidable errors and demonstrate that the lawyer exercised independent judgment. My process has six essential parts:
My Name Is on the Brief
The most important fact about legal technology is also the simplest: the technology does not sign the filing. I do. My name, not Westlaw’s, Lexis’s, or ChatGPT’s, appears on the brief. My client is relying
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Technology’s Effect on Advocacy
on my judgment. The court is relying on my candor. Opposing counsel is entitled to expect that quotations and citations have not been fabricated or distorted. That responsibility has remained constant throughout every change in legal research. It was true when lawyers consulted printed Shepard’s volumes. It remained true when Westlaw and Lexis made research faster. It remains true now that AI can generate pages of polished legal prose in seconds. Artificial intelligence has made me a faster lawyer in some respects. It has also made me more cautious about anything that sounds polished before it has been verified. The easier it becomes to produce authoritative-sounding language, the more important it becomes to insist on source-based analysis.
I came to law because I had been a plaintiff. I know what it feels like to wonder whether the person representing you has found the controlling case, preserved the crucial issue, and understood the record well enough to protect what matters. That experience still informs the way I practice. Every client who enters my office is entrusting me with a story that may already have been doubted, minimized, or ignored. My responsibility is to ensure that the story is preserved in the record, supported by the evidence, and presented under the governing law with absolute integrity.
Technology can help me do that work. It can never relieve me of the obligation to do it well.
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Consumer Attorneys of California
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Technology’s Effect on Advocacy
The Settings Nobody Changed: Protecting Your Firm and Data from Cyber Attacks By Mark Mina
A firm’s worst week rarely begins with anything that looks like a cyberattack. It begins with someone signing in. No alarm sounds, because as far as the system can tell, nothing strange happened. A user’s password worked, and a normal session opened. Everything that comes afterward happens behind a seemingly harmless login the platform had every reason to trust. Four things open the door to a cybersecurity attack: Reused passwords. When a vendor site gets hacked, that same password opens the firm’s email. A message that looks like an ordinary work email, such as an invoice or a potential new client. Software nobody updated, ignoring prompts to do so and notices of security risks the update would solve. A sign-in nobody noticed (often logging on from another country at odd hours). There is no singular attacker anywhere in that list. A firm builds every opening of those doors itself, slowly, and without meaning to. The threat that finally shows up does not create the opening. It simply walks through one that was already there. What can law firms do to prevent the attacks?
Moving to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace or any hosted platform buys real protection. The platform takes the data centers, the servers, and the software, updating and maintaining them for users. Law firms, however, are still held accountable to three things: the data a firm puts in, the settings a firm chooses, and the accounts a firm assigns to users and staff. Most major platforms state this plainly in their documentation. From the perspective of a company preventing and shutting down cybersecurity attacks on law firms, most incidents stem from a user permission that was overly permissive that nobody revisited or updated, an account nobody closed, or a sharing setting nobody adjusted. All electronic devices and platforms come with default settings. Never adjusting those settings or misconfiguring them leaves your firm and data exposed. For example, let’s say you use Dropbox or Box.com to create a shared folder for a client to upload documents. Your staff does not adjust any settings and makes the link public to anyone who has it, with no expiration date on visibility. Material can sit in the open for years, and the first sign of trouble is the wrong person finding it. Most firms are still running on the original settings. Another default setting firms rely on deals with multi-factor authentication which commonly prompts only when the platform decides a login looks risky. This is not the same as asking every time. Without conditional access rules, multi-factor authentication
Mark Mina is Founder & CEO of EZ Tek Solutions and has built a thriving managed solutions company serving 50+ businesses across Southern California’s legal, nonprofit, and accounting sectors. He lives the daily reality of implementing AI, cybersecurity, and operational technology, often working with growing law firms.
mark@ezteksolutions.com
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may not catch the real threat: middle-of-the-night login from outside the country, allowing hours of open access before anyone at your firm wakes up. This is a major one: setting up your Global Administrator. Typically, whoever first signed the office up for email still holds Global Administrator on the account they personally use all day. That one account reads the mail, opens the attachments, browses the web, and has complete control of the environment sitting directly behind it. Microsoft is blunt on the subject: Global Administrator belongs to emergencies, and administration belongs on a separate account. To put it more clearly, if a partner at a law firm signs the contracts to set up Microsoft accounts, by default, the partner, and their connected email address, becomes the Global Administrator. Instead, a different user should be created not connected to a day-to-day email address. Without doing this, one convincing message from or to that mailbox is not a minor incident - it exposes the entire firm. Do you know who at your firm can create new shared workspaces, public folders, or even create email forwarding rules? After a few years, a single staff member can unknowingly, and unintentionally, create dozens of digital workspaces and public folders, full of client material, with no owner and nobody checking access. None of that is the platform being careless. Defaults get written for smooth adoption and broad compatibility, reasonable for a software company and poor for an office holding privileged files. It is common for staff to also be able to create rules for email forwarding, even to emails outside the firm’s email domain. This is problematic for firms because
October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Protect your clients by protecting their data.
forwarding rules outlive a password change! A default is a floor. Everyone at the firm should follow the same configuration rule: support staff and attorneys should have access to what their job requires and nothing beyond it. It sounds obvious, but it’s a common misstep, especially for growing firms. You don’t need a specialist to get the basics in order. Better protect your firm today by completing the following: Invest in a hosted platform like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. Require multi-factor authentication at every sign- in, not only when the platform decides a login looks risky. Start with email accounts, as email can reset all other platforms attempting logins. Move Global Administrator off any account used for daily work and create a separate account for administration. Narrow permissions to match job responsibilities. Review who can create sites, groups, and shared workspaces, and move default sharing off its most permissive setting. Restrict automatic forwarding to outside addresses, and limit who can create mailbox rules. Teams change, tools change, people leave the firm. Never adjusting settings does not make you or your firm unlucky when it comes to cyberattacks – it will put you next in line.
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When AI Writes the Police Report: What Plaintiffs’ Attorneys Need to Know By Denisse Gastélum Artificial intelligence is now writing police reports. Let that sink in for a moment.
ChatGPT, and Truleo’s Field Notes, which is powered by Amazon Bedrock. Both work in essentially the same way. An officer uploads body- worn camera footage, the software transcribes the audio using generative AI, and the system produces a narrative police report based on the verbal interchange it captured. The officer selects the incident category, reviews the draft, fills in missing details, and signs an acknowledgment that they reviewed the report and that the facts are true and correct. Here is what you need to understand. First, these tools process audio only. They do not analyze the video. That means the AI cannot see what happened, it can only hear what was said. Think about that in the context of a use-of-force case. If an officer does not narrate what they observe in real time, the AI has no way to capture it. A chokehold that is visible on video but never described aloud will not appear in the AI- generated narrative. Second, the AI is trained to produce polished, professional prose. A report that might have been three rough paragraphs of an officer’s handwritten notes becomes a clean, detailed, authoritative-sounding narrative. That is the product’s selling point: it is also the problem. And the technology is spreading fast. Axon has described Draft One as its fastest-growing product. The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office alone generated more than 3,000 Draft One reports between December 2024 and March 2025. In California, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has already adopted a policy governing its use. (LASD Manual, Policy No. 25-10, “ Law Enforcement use of Artificial
I litigate civil rights cases for a living: police shootings, in-custody deaths, excessive force. In every single one of those cases, the police report is foundational. It shapes the investigation. It drives the media narrative. It influences charging decisions. And it becomes the backbone of discovery. So when I learned that law enforcement agencies are now uploading body-worn camera footage to AI-powered software that drafts a fully written police report in minutes, polished, detailed, and authoritative- sounding, I had one reaction: we need to talk about this. The reality? These reports shape what the public believes happened. They shape what prosecutors believe happened. And if we as plaintiffs’ attorneys are not paying attention, they will shape what juries believe happened, too.
How AI Report Writing Works.
The two dominant products on the market are Axon’s Draft One, which runs on a variant of
Denisse Gastélum is a civil rights attorney focusing on police shootings and in-custody death cases, representing plaintiffs in state and federal courts throughout the State of California. She is the founder and trial lawyer of Gastélum Law, APC.
dgastelum@gastelumfirm.com
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