Commercial Litigation Update

On March 10, 2026, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) announced its “first ever” department-wide Corporate Enforcement and Voluntary Self-Disclosure Policy (“CEP”) for all criminal cases.

On March 4, 2026, Nippon Life Insurance Company of America (“Nippon Life”) filed suit against OpenAI Foundation and OpenAI Group PBC in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois—claiming that a covered employee’s zealous use of the artificial intelligence (“AI”) tool, ChatGPT, for pro se litigation caused the chatbot to engage in tortious interference with a contract, abuse of process, and the unlicensed practice of law.

A federal judge recently concluded that the defendant in a white-collar securities dispute may not claim that his conversations with the artificial intelligence (“AI”) tool, Claude, are privileged. Litigators and clients now must take heed.

Kalshi, a federally regulated prediction market, is betting big on its business model. Whether that bet pays off depends on how courts resolve a growing conflict between federal commodities regulation and state gambling laws.

Our colleagues Thomas Jaworski, Elena M. Quattrone, and Maurice Wells published an Insight that will be of interest to readers involved in white collar defense: “Recalibrating Economic Crime Sentencing: The U.S. Sentencing Commission’s Proposed Reforms to Section 2B1.1 and What They Mean for the Defense Bar.”

What You Need to Know:

The U.S. Sentencing Commission (the “Commission”) has proposed amendments to federal fraud sentencing guidelines and is soliciting comments from the public.

• Simplified Loss Table: The proposed amendments reduce the 16-tier loss table to eight broader tiers, aiming to simplify sentencing and reduce disputes over marginal loss amounts.
• Focus on Culpability and Harm: New guidelines emphasize non-economic victim harm (e.g., emotional trauma) and introduce mitigating factors for defendants acting under coercion or showing early remediation.
• Retroactivity and Public Input: The Commission is considering retroactive application of these changes and invites public comments by February 10, 2026, ahead of a May 1, 2026, deadline for Congressional submission.

Read the full Insight here.

Artificial intelligence is moving beyond standalone large language model wrappers toward collections of specialized AI agents that reason, act, and collaborate to achieve complex outcomes. This multi-agent vision, articulated in Google’s Introduction to Agents whitepaper,[1] marks a subtle, but seismic, shift in how businesses will deploy AI; and spotlights nuanced legal challenges that litigators and in-house counsel should start addressing now.

[1] https://www.kaggle.com/whitepaper-introduction-to-agents (last visited January 21, 2026).

Contrary to the presupposition of many, the U.S. Supreme Court did not render a decision on Friday resolving the question of the president’s authority to impose tariffs through executive orders and related questions concerning the extent to which congressional mandates should be required.

Instead, the Court issued a 5–4 decision in the case of Bowe v. United States. Resolving a substantial split among the circuit courts, the Supreme Court held, per Justice Sotomayor, that a provision of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) requiring federal courts to dismiss certain previously raised habeas corpus claims applies only to state prisoners’ applications.

In the wake of this country’s longest federal shutdown, federal courts were facing unprecedented decision-making whether to stay civil proceedings implicating federal employees and agencies.

The Anti-Deficiency Act prohibits federal agencies from spending beyond their allotted funding and simultaneously restricts federal employees from working on a volunteer basis. The Act provides, in relevant part:

An officer or employee of the United States Government or of the District of Columbia government may not accept voluntary services for either government or employ personal services exceeding that authorized by law except for emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property.

31 U.S.C. § 1342 (emphasis added).

During lapses in federal funding, voluntary services are only authorized in very limited circumstances, but the parameters of the “safety of human life” or “protection of property” exceptions have not been uniformly defined nor applied across the courts.

On December 11, 2025, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) announced in a letter to the dietary supplement industry that it is actively considering requests to amend its dietary supplement labeling regulation at 21 C.F.R. § 101.93(d), which governs placement of the disclaimer required for structure/function claims under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (“DSHEA”).

The regulation currently requires the DSHEA disclaimer—which states that the product has not been evaluated by FDA and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent disease—to appear on each panel of a product label where a qualifying structure/function claim is made.

Based on its initial review, FDA indicated that removing the “each panel” requirement would be consistent with the DSHEA, could reduce label clutter and unnecessary costs, and would align with the agency’s historical enforcement posture, noting that the requirement has rarely, if ever, been enforced. FDA further stated that, absent significant concerns, it is likely to propose formal rulemaking to amend the regulation.

As previously reported on June 3, 2024, the January 1, 2024 amendments to CPLR 2106 revised the statutory language required for attorney affirmations in New York.

At that time, we cautioned that attorney affirmations relying on the traditional “under the penalty of perjury” language could be deemed defective under the amended statute, which now requires revised language that the statements are affirmed, among other things, “under the penalties of perjury under the laws of New York, which may include a fine or imprisonment.” Since then, as anticipated, courts have begun to strictly enforce the revised requirements, with several rejecting affirmations that fail to incorporate the updated statutory verbiage. However, recent decisions suggest that—at least in some circumstances—such defects may be curable.