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Welcome to this week's edition of The Legal Wire!
AI’s pressure points showed up everywhere this week: Florida’s attorney general went after OpenAI and Sam Altman over ChatGPT safety, while CNN joined the publisher pile-on suing Perplexity for alleged copy-and-output use. At the same time, States are drafting faster than Washington can coordinate, with new frontier-model audit and reporting proposals landing alongside tighter rules on kids’ online safety and AI companions.
On the business side, the legal AI arms race is splitting into two tracks. China moved to harden control over cross-border tech deals after the Meta–Manus block, and in the Am Law 100, Kirkland signaled “build” at full volume with a $500M proprietary platform meant to cover client matters end to end.
Our feature this week follows the other thread running through all of it: trust at the point of delivery. We had an early look at nu:legal, a new platform built around a simple idea: make expert legal help available to SMEs without forcing them to choose between expensive law firm hours or confident-but-wrong chatbot output.
This week’s Highlights:
Industry news and updates
nu:legal and the expertise that never leaves the room
AI regulation tracker
AI tools to supercharge your productivity
Legal prompt of the week
Latest AI incidents & legal tech map
Headlines from The Legal Industry You Shouldn't Miss
➡️ Florida Attorney General Sues OpenAI And Sam Altman Over ChatGPT Safety | Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, seeking to hold Altman personally liable for harm caused to Floridians. The civil action alleges deceptive trade practices, negligence, product liability violations, fraudulent misrepresentation, and public nuisance, claiming ChatGPT poses risks of addiction, cognitive decline, suicide, and violence. The complaint cites the Florida State University shooting and other incidents. Florida is the first state to sue OpenAI over design and safety, alongside a separate ongoing criminal investigation.
Jun 1, 2026, Source: NBC News
➡️ China Tightens Controls On Foreign Deals After Meta-Manus Block | Reported by Reuters China has issued new rules tightening oversight of overseas deals involving Chinese investors, technology, and data, a month after ordering Meta to unwind its acquisition of AI start-up Manus. Effective July 1, the regulations provide a formal legal basis to force the unwinding of completed transactions, ban cross-border talent transfers in sensitive sectors, and target "Singapore-washing" practices. Beijing can also retaliate against foreign firms whose home countries restrict Chinese investment, including by cancelling work visas. The framework covers Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan.
Jun 1, 2026, Source: Thomson Reuters
➡️ US States Push New AI And Children's Online Safety Laws | Three US states have advanced significant AI and digital safety measures. Illinois SB 315, awaiting Governor JB Pritzker's signature, imposes first-of-its-kind annual third-party audits on frontier AI developers, alongside pre-deployment reports and catastrophic-risk thresholds tied to $1 billion in potential damages. Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont signed SB 4 (data broker registration, geolocation sale ban) and SB 5 (frontier model reporting, ADMT disclosure, AI companion limits, regulatory sandbox by 2028). New York included the Safe By Design Act in its fiscal year 2027 budget, restricting minor-adult interactions on platforms and defaulting AI companion access off for minors.
May 28, 2026, Source: IAPP
➡️ CNN Joins Growing List Of Publishers Suing Perplexity Over AI Content Use | CNN's federal lawsuit alleges Perplexity copied thousands of its articles, videos, and images to develop AI products that then generated outputs "identical or substantially similar" to CNN's reporting. Perplexity is already facing similar claims from The New York Times, Reddit, and Dow Jones. The case follows Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement last year with a class of authors, the first major AI copyright resolution. Some publishers, by contrast, have opted for licensing deals granting AI firms access to verified news.
May 28, 2026, Source: Competition Policy International
➡️ Kirkland Builds $500M Proprietary AI Platform To Cover Entire Client Matters | Kirkland & Ellis is investing about $500 million over three to four years to develop a proprietary AI platform designed to support client work end-to-end across practice areas, with rollouts beginning this summer. Roughly 250 lawyers, including 100 partners, are shaping the system, which the firm will own outright. The move contrasts with peers licensing Harvey or Legora, though White & Case (Atlas), Cleary (Springbook acquisition), and Troutman (Athena) have also built in-house tools as the Am Law 100 arms race intensifies.
May 28, 2026, Source: Law.com
Will this be the Next Big Thing in A.I?
Legal Technology
nu:legal and the expertise that never leaves the room
Most founders can name the moment their company began. For Bork Morfaw, it began with a question he was glad to answer, asked often enough that answering it well became its own problem. He was a lawyer at Freshfields, and friends, and friends of friends, kept coming to him with legal questions they had nowhere sensible to take. He wanted to help, and did; what he lacked was a way of helping that scaled past his own evenings. Send me what you have, he would say, and I will at least point you to the right person. Over time, that improvised arrangement began to look like the outline of something.
The people asking were not short of intelligence or ambition. They were founders and operators building real things, and what stopped them was rarely a hard legal question; it was a basic bureaucratic hurdle keeping them from making progress. The realistic options were to pay a law firm several thousand euros for something routine, or to ask a general-purpose chatbot and hope, and the chatbot route has a particular failure mode: when it is wrong, it is wrong with total confidence. What was missing was a third option, and, on the other side of the same problem, a way for an expert to answer many people at once rather than one at a time.
nu:legal, the company he left Freshfields at the start of 2025 to build, is the attempt to construct exactly that. It is a vertically integrated legal platform aimed at small and medium-sized businesses in Germany and Europe, and it has spent its development in stealth, surfacing publicly for the first time with its launch today, 27 May.
The Legal Wire was given an early and exclusive look at the company ahead of that date, including an extended conversation with Bork, and what follows draws on both.
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The AI Regulation Tracker offers a searchable overview that gives you instant snapshots of how each country is handling AI laws.
AI Tools that will supercharge your productivity
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🆕 ILS - Legal technology for investment fund teams. ProVision automates side letter management, MFN processes, and investor comment workstreams, providing funds and law firms a single platform for all legal obligations and investor relationships.
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Want more Legal AI Tools? Check out our
Top AI Tools for Legal Professionals
The weekly ChatGPT prompt that will boost your productivity
Why it helps: Gives you a quick, lightweight way to prove (with numbers) which AI workflows are saving time.
Draft a simple tracking plan to measure whether AI is actually saving time in my legal work.
Inputs:
Team type: [solo / firm / in-house]
5 recurring tasks I do weekly: [list]
Current baseline time per task (rough): [mins]
Tools used: [ ]
Risk tolerance: [low/medium/high]
Output:
A one-page tracker (table) I can copy into a spreadsheet: Task | Baseline time | AI-assisted time | Time saved | Quality check | Notes.
A 2-week test plan (what to track daily, how to keep it lightweight).
A “stop/keep/scale” rule after 14 days (based on time saved + error rate).
Three suggestions to improve ROI immediately (prompting, templates, workflow changes).
Collecting Data to make Artificial Intelligence Safer
The Responsible AI Collaborative is a not‑for‑profit organization working to present real‑world AI harms through its Artificial Intelligence Incident Database.
View the latest reported incidents below:
⚠️ 2026-03-17 | Gemini and Grok Reportedly Misidentified Authentic Minab School-Strike Graveyard Photo as Unrelated Disaster Imagery | View Incident
⚠️ 2026-02-28 | Purportedly AI-Manipulated Satellite Image Reportedly Claimed Iranian Strike Destroyed U.S. Radar in Qatar | View Incident
⚠️ 2025-05-01 | Scammers Reportedly Used Real-Time Deepfake Video to Impersonate Veriff CEO Kaarel Kotkas in WhatsApp Fraud Attempt | View Incident
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