Month: May 2026

The Georgia Supreme Court on Tuesday disciplined a prosecutor, finding her misuse of artificial intelligence tools led to fake and misleading case citations appearing in a murder case ruling.

The state’s high court barred Deborah Leslie, a Clayton County assistant district attorney, from appearing before the justices for six months and ordered her to complete additional legal education on ethics, brief writing and proper AI use.

The court found that “numerous fictitious or misattributed case citations” appeared in a lower court’s 2025 order denying a murder defendant’s bid for a new trial.

“Citing cases that do not exist or do not support the proposition for which they are cited is a violation of this Court’s rules and falls far beneath the conduct we expect from Georgia lawyers,” Justice Benjamin Land wrote.

Some attorneys fail to vet AI results

State and federal courts across the country have disciplined attorneys for using generative AI tools for legal research and drafting without vetting the results. The Georgia case is among the rarer instances involving a prosecutor’s use of AI, and stands out because the lawyers’ AI errors were repeated in a court opinion.

Leslie and the Clayton County District Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Leslie apologized in an earlier court filing for failing to independently verify the AI-generated citations.

The sanction came in the appeal of Hannah Payne, who was sentenced to life in prison plus 13 years for the murder and false imprisonment of Kenneth Herring.

Leslie’s AI-generated false citations appeared in a proposed order she prepared, urging the trial judge to deny a request for a new trial. The judge adopted much of the proposed order, including fabricated citations, in denying Payne’s request, the Georgia Supreme Court said.

The state justices on Tuesday urged trial judges to review proposed orders “with the understanding that artificial intelligence software, with all of its potential risks and benefits, may have been used.”

The justices vacated the earlier ruling and sent the case back to the trial judge, directing that a new order be issued without fictitious citations.

“Hannah Payne has strong issues for appeal. It is a shame that the State’s misconduct is now delaying her opportunity to have those issues be decided,” her lawyer, Andrew Fleischman, said in a statement.

Source: https://molawyersmedia.com/2026/05/05/georgia-prosecutor-disciplined-ai-errors-murder-case/

Apple argues that without a stay, it will face irreparable harm. Apple says it will have to litigate the fundamentals of its business model with the “highly prejudicial taint of being (improperly) found to have acted in contempt of the court’s initial order” with the world watching, plus the case would require it to disclose confidential business information, which can’t be undone.

Regulators around the world are watching this case to determine what commission rate Apple may charge on covered purchases in huge markets outside the United States. No proceeding setting the commission Apple may charge–an endeavor that itself is fraught with challenges and raises the prospect of the courts engaging in improper rate-setting–should be allowed to unfold under the false and prejudicial auspices that Apple acted in contempt by charging a commission based on an injunction that did not even mention commissions.

The Supreme Court’s finding could also affect the scope of the case, because one of Apple’s arguments is that the injunction should only apply to ‌Epic Games‌, not all developers that distribute apps in the United States.

For a recap, in 2021, the U.S. Northern District Court of California ordered Apple to relax its anti-steering rules as part of the ruling in the ‌Epic Games‌ v. Apple case. Apple was told to allow developers to link to alternate payment options in apps. Apple complied, but still charged high fees (three percent less than its standard fees), leading the court to find Apple in contempt of court for willfully violating the injunction.

In April 2025, Apple was barred from collecting any fees on links in apps in the U.S. ‌App Store‌, a change Apple implemented the same month. Apple appealed, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed Apple violated the injunction, but said the company should be able to receive compensation for its technology. The appeals court then ordered the district court to calculate a reasonable fee, and that’s what Apple wants to pause.

Apple is planning to challenge the district court’s contempt of court ruling and the scope of the injunction, and it does not want to go to court for fee calculations when there’s a chance the Supreme Court could vacate the decision entirely.

All Apple seeks here is a stay of the mandate so this Court can consider Apple’s petition before it is subjected to a remand proceeding that could reshape the global app market based on the false premise that Apple engaged in civil contempt.

Apple asked the appeals court to stay the fee calculation phase until it heard back from the Supreme Court. The appeals court agreed initially, but then reversed course after ‌Epic Games‌ challenged the decision. Apple is now asking the Supreme Court for the same stay that the appeals court denied.

Apple wants to keep its current zero-fee link-out commission structure in place while it appeals to the Supreme Court, which means developers in the U.S. would continue to pay no fees for purchases made using third-party payment options in their apps while the case plays out.

If the Supreme Court grants Apple’s request for a stay, the zero-fee setup will remain in place while Apple waits on a decision from the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court does not grant the stay or declines to hear the case, Apple and ‌Epic Games‌ will return to the district court to determine the reasonable fee that Apple can collect.

While Apple is asking the Supreme Court for a stay as it prepares a full filing, Apple has also suggested that its filing could be used as a certiorari petition, so we could soon hear whether the Supreme Court will decide to hear the ‌Epic Games‌ v. Apple case. Apple will not be able to submit a petition for certiorari that will be considered before the summer recess.

The mandate that will send Apple back to the district court for fee calculations goes into effect on May 5.

Source: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/04/apple-supreme-court-app-store-fee-pause/

Federal prosecutors on May 6 announced that 30 people, including corporate lawyers and financial professionals have been indicted in connection with an insider trading scheme that relied on information about mergers stolen from major law firms.

Nineteen people were arrested, including Nicolo Nourafchan, a corporate attorney who had worked at several large law firms and who was at the center of a vast, decade-long scheme that netted him and his co-defendants tens of millions of dollars in illicit profits, federal prosecutors in Boston said.

The Yale Law School-educated attorney had practiced from 2013 to 2023 at Sidley Austin, Latham & Watkins and Goodwin Procter, according to an indictment, which did not name the victim firms but detailed publicly announced corporate deals on which they worked.

The Los Angeles resident and the other defendants face a host of charges, including securities fraud, and were expected to make their appearances in federal courts in California, Florida and New York.

Two defendants named in the two indictments unsealed on May 6 are in Russia and Israel and are considered fugitives, prosecutors said. Another nine had previously pleaded guilty in related cases that were only unsealed on May 6.

Lawyers for Nourafchan and the others could not be immediately identified. The law firms did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Prosecutors said Nourafchan and others accessed law firms’ internal computer networks to view confidential documents concerning pending mergers and then provided tips about those yet-to-be-announced deals to others in exchange for kickbacks.

Nourafchan and his partner in the scheme, New York lawyer Robert Yadgarov, allegedly recruited lawyers and others to serve as sources of inside information in exchange for payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.

Nourafchan and Yadgarov also allegedly provided inside information to a network of traders and middlemen. The traders in turn placed trades on the tips on either the two lawyers’ behalf or on their own behalf, and many then passed the information on to additional traders, authorities said.

In total, the traders implicated in the scheme engaged in insider trading ahead of nearly 30 M&A deals involving public companies, such as Amazon’s proposal in 2022 to acquire iRobot, a deal the companies later abandoned in the face of antitrust regulator opposition.

At the time, Nourafchan was employed by Goodwin Procter, which advised iRobot. According to the indictment, he viewed confidential materials about the deal on the law firm’s document management system while “on leave” from the firm.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; editing by Aurora Ellis)
Source: https://masslawyersweekly.com/2026/05/06/lawyers-traders-among-30-charged-by-us-in-global-insider-trading-case/