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Welcome to this week's edition of The Legal Wire!

The week AI ran headfirst into the fine print. U.S. judges are split on whether machine-decoded viewing data breaks the VPPA, raising a bigger question: when AI can read what humans can’t, what counts as “private”? Australia answered a different battle cleanly, no copyright loophole for AI training, signaling licenses or bust. Inside firms, the game shifts from hours to IP: Gavel Exec lets practices bottle their playbooks in Word and sell them by subscription, while Thomson Reuters taps DeepJudge to fuse firm knowledge with trusted content. And from London, Sir Geoffrey Vos cautions: let AI speed the drudgery, not the judgment. Plus, our feature dives into smartContract CLM, the quiet engineer bringing order to chaos.

This week’s Highlights:

• Industry News and Updates

• Reimagining Contract Management with smartContract CLM

• AI Regulation Updates

• AI Tools to Supercharge your productivity

• Legal prompt of the week

• Latest AI Incidents & Legal Tech Map

➡️ AI Tools Complicate Decades-Old Video Privacy Law | AI’s ability to interpret and translate code is making it harder for US courts to apply the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans sharing someone’s video viewing data. Courts are already split on whether decoding data to identify what someone watched counts as a privacy breach, and AI could deepen that divide. Judges disagree on whether the law covers data that only AI tools can interpret. Some courts say AI raises the bar for what an “ordinary person” can decode, while others argue the law shouldn’t hinge on new tech. Experts warn that if AI becomes too capable of translating data, privacy protections could erode further.
^{Oct 27, 2025, Source: Bloomberg Law}

➡️ Australia Rejects Copyright Loophole for AI Training | The Australian government has ruled out granting AI developers free use of copyrighted works for training models. Attorney-General Michelle Rowland confirmed there will be no “text and data mining” exemption, insisting artists must be fairly compensated. The decision follows backlash from creators after the Productivity Commission suggested such an exemption. Industry groups like ARIA and Screenrights welcomed the move, calling it a clear message that tech firms must license creative content rather than exploit it for AI training.
^{Oct 26, 2025, Source: ABC News}

➡️ Law Firms Use Gavel Exec to Productize Legal Expertise | Gavel Exec is helping law firms turn legal services into shareable products. Using AI-powered Playbooks, redlining rules and contract review standards, firms can now embed their expertise into Microsoft Word for in-house teams to use directly. This lets firms offer subscription-based access to their know-how while maintaining quality and consistency. “It’s given me a new revenue stream while making my practice more efficient,” said Martin Algie of MIA Contract Lawyers. Built by practicing deal lawyers, Gavel Exec combines precision, automation, and collaboration to align outside counsel and in-house teams in real time.
^{Oct 23, 2025, Source: The Legal Wire}

➡️ Thomson Reuters and DeepJudge Partner to Advance Legal AI | Thomson Reuters has teamed up with DeepJudge, an AI startup founded by former Google researchers, to integrate its enterprise search technology into CoCounsel Legal. The partnership will let firms securely search internal knowledge alongside Thomson Reuters’ trusted content, streamlining workflows and enhancing AI-driven research. DeepJudge, recently ranked the top recommended legal AI tool by SKILLS.law, enables instant, context-aware access to firm intelligence. The collaboration aligns with Thomson Reuters’ $200 million annual AI investment to power the next generation of professional-grade legal technology.
^{Oct 22, 2025, Source: Thomson Reuters}

➡️ Senior Judge Warns Against AI Making Court Decisions | AI could decide a case that takes years “in just a couple of minutes,” according to Sir Geoffrey Vos, the UK’s second most senior judge. Speaking at the Legal Geek Conference, Vos compared AI to a “chainsaw”, powerful but dangerous in the wrong hands. He said AI tools are valuable for drafting and research but should never replace judges, who bring “emotion, idiosyncrasy, empathy and insight.” His comments follow recent cases where lawyers submitted fake citations generated by AI, prompting the High Court to warn against misuse. Vos urged caution, noting that while AI can save “time and drudgery,” judicial decisions must remain human to preserve trust and fairness.
^{Oct 22, 2025, Source: Independent}

Legal Technology

Reimagining Contract Management with smartContract CLM

Contract management isn’t glamorous.  Most of the time, legal professionals are digging through once-organized folders that have devolved into chaos.  But what if there was a way out of ‘survival mode’? That is where smartContract CLM, developed by Amit Garg and his team, comes in.

Built to reduce chaos, smartContract CLM is a system that understands that legal work happens in real-time, under pressure, and across departments. If you’ve ever lost track of an approval thread, chased down the latest version of a redline, or faced the existential dread of a renewal deadline that flew under the radar, this one’s for you.

We took a closer look at what smartContract CLM offers and got in touch with its team to understand how this lean, modular platform is carving out its space in the increasingly competitive CLM landscape.

Plenty of contract platforms are designed to be “scalable” or “AI-powered,” but smartContract CLM really delivers on this promise. It’s designed to flex around your organization (not the other way around) and offers end-to-end visibility across the contract lifecycle, while keeping both legal and business teams in sync.

Click here to continue reading the full interview

The AI Regulation Tracker offers a clickable global map that gives you instant snapshots of how each country is handling AI laws, along with the most recent policy developments.

The most recent developments from the past week:

📋 27 October 2025 | Federal government rules out changing copyright law to give AI companies free rein: It is reported that, according to Australia's Attorney-General Michelle Rowland, the Australian Labor government has definitively ruled out introducing a copyright exemption for AI companies training their models on Australian creative works. "This government has repeatedly said that there are no plans to weaken copyright protections when it comes to AI," said the Attorney-General. Such a carve-out has been fiercely rejected by the creative sector, after it was floated in a Productivity Commission report. A government working group on AI and copyright will meet over the next two days to examine whether the current laws need a refresh.

📋 24 October 2025 | Kazakhstan to integrate AI into lawmaking process: Kazakhstan's government plans to introduce an AI-powered assistant to aid in developing regulatory legal acts. This system will analyze international legal practices, monitor developments, and ensure draft laws comply with the Constitution, as announced by Vice Minister of Justice Bekbolat Moldabekov. This initiative is part of a broader digitalization agenda, which includes an automated legal advisor on the adilet.zan.kz portal and the Digital Bailiff program that automates enforcement proceedings. The forthcoming AI assistant aims to enhance the quality, coherence, and legal stability of legislation by providing expert support during the drafting process.

📋 22 October 2025 | MeitY proposes new rule to require companies to label AI-generated content: The Ministry of Electronics and IT has issued a public notice, inviting feedback from stakeholders on draft amendments to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021. The draft amendments aim to strengthen due diligence obligations for intermediaries, especially social media intermediaries, by introducing a clear definition of "synthetically generated information," mandating labelling and metadata embedding requirements for such content, setting visibility and audibility standards to ensure content is prominently marked, and requiring enhanced verification for "significant social media intermediaries". The consultation closes on 6 November 2025.

🆕 Recital - Gather and organize contracts in hours, not weeks, pulling from cloud storage, email, and CLM. Keep in-flight agreements on track with AI-assisted review and organization.

🆕 LegalEd CPD - Transform Your Law Firm’s Training With An All-In-One Online Learning Academy

🆕 Etain - Intelligent Workspaces are AI-native enterprise applications that combine real-world data structures with orchestrated workflows, designed to make knowledge work smarter, faster, and more precise.

Want more Legal AI Tools? Check out our
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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:

⚠️ 2022-08-10 | CFPB Reportedly Finds Hello Digit's Automated Savings Algorithm Caused Overdrafts and Orders Redress with $2.7M Penalty | View Incident

⚠️ 2025-09-29 | Donald Trump Reportedly Posts Purported AI-Modified Video of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries During U.S. Government Shutdown Talks | View Incident

⚠️ 2025-08-01 | Gaggle AI Monitoring at Lawrence, Kansas High School Reportedly Misflags Student Content and Blocks Emails | View Incident

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