United States: Litigation, Mediation & Arbitration

Oregon's civil discovery rules diverge sharply from federal practice by eliminating interrogatories and generally prohibiting compelled pretrial disclosure of retained expert testimony. Understanding these procedural differences and adapting discovery strategy accordingly can mean the difference between building a winning record and discovering critical gaps too late to address them.

The Texas Business Court recently clarified who qualifies as an attorney when dealing with confidential and attorney's eyes only designations in discovery. In a case involving alleged trade secret misappropriation between rival transformer manufacturers, the court examined whether attorneys from India representing the plaintiff in other matters could access protected documents in the Texas state court case...

A federal court ruling examines what happens when a party inadvertently produces over 5,400 privileged documents to government investigators and attempts to claw them back. The decision hinges on whether reasonable steps were taken to prevent disclosure in the first place, with the court finding that flawed document review processes and inadequate quality control led to privilege waiver despite the inadvertent nature of the production.

When Frontier AI – the industry term for test systems progressing toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – crosses sentient human guardrails, the rule of law must engage. In July 2026, two Frontier AI systems (OpenAI's AI agent and Anthropic's Claude models) broke out of laboratory containment and hacked company networks over the open Internet. It is a tipping point for the rule of law to enter the frontier and bring order when an autonomous system jailbreaks and attacks an unsuspecting victim.

On May 14, 2026, the United States Supreme Court delivered an important win for truck crash victims and highway safety. In Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, the Court unanimously held that federal law does not shield freight brokers from state-law claims when they negligently hire unsafe motor carriers. The ruling reverses the Seventh Circuit and confirms that negligent-hiring claims against brokers fall within the safety exception of the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act.

The Federal Circuit vacated a PTAB decision on patent obviousness, establishing that a provisional application must provide written description support for at least one published claim to qualify as prior art under its earlier filing date. This ruling clarifies the requirements for claiming priority from provisional applications and impacts how patent practitioners should approach provisional filing strategies.

The Federal Circuit vacated a PTAB decision on patent obviousness, establishing that a provisional application must provide written description support for at least one published claim to qualify as prior art under its earlier filing date. This ruling clarifies the requirements for claiming priority from provisional applications and impacts how patent practitioners should approach provisional filing strategies.

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A federal appeals court has reversed a lower court's dilution ruling in the decade-long trademark dispute between Jack Daniel's whiskey and VIP's "Bad Spaniels" parody dog toy. The Ninth Circuit held that Jack Daniel's failed to prove the humorous dog toy actually tarnished its famous brand, despite creating a mental association with the whiskey marks.

For hundreds of years, the world’s sovereign nations refused to allow any other foreign sovereign to be sued in their courts without the sovereign’s consent. The guiding principle was “absolute sovereign immunity,” an outgrowth of the ancient legal precept rex non potest peccare, understood to mean “the king can do no wrong.” The principle also was recognized as wise foreign policy because it extended "grace and comity" to other sovereigns.

The Texas Supreme Court's decision in Paxton v. City of Austin reveals a procedural trap for businesses suing the government: winning the right to be heard can paradoxically freeze the entire case. When governmental defendants challenge a court's jurisdiction and lose, they can immediately appeal, putting all proceedings on hold—potentially for months or years.

WilmerHale partners analyze three pivotal Supreme Court rulings from the 2025-2026 term that reshape the landscape for transnational litigation, examining how these decisions affect corporate liability...