标签：#legal

Where AI incidents in legal actually come from, and what infrastructure (not policy) prevents them. Blake Aber · Predicate Ventures · 2026 The policy layer is table stakes. It isn't enough. When Sullivan & Cromwell apologized to a federal bankruptcy judge in April 2026 for AI hallucinations in a court filing, the firm's apology letter said the firm had policies. Safeguards existed. Those safeguards weren't followed. That framing, "the safeguard existed but wasn't followed," is how a policy failure gets described. But something more specific happened: a hallucination was generated, wasn't caught at generation time, wasn't caught at review time, and made it into a document that got filed. That's not a policy problem. It's an infrastructure problem. The distinction matters because it determines what you build next. What policy can and can't do Policy is a promise made before the event. A well-written AI acceptable-use policy says: don't submit output you haven't reviewed; verify citations before they go into a document; a human must approve anything client-facing. This works when the human executing the task has time, attention, and professional accountability in that moment. It fails when one of those is missing: a deadline, a junior practitioner, a late-night run. Policy can't: Verify a citation at the point of generation Flag output that has drifted below a confidence threshold Stop hallucinated text from appearing in a draft before a human ever sees it Detect when the underlying model is behaving differently than it was in testing Policy can: Set the expectation that review must happen Define who bears accountability when it doesn't Create a paper trail after the fact One of those is prevention. The other is compliance. What infrastructure does instead An AI harness layer operates at the point of generation, not at the point of review. This reflects a broader reality that production AI is mostly harness and very little model . For legal work specifically, three com

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In 2024, Orca Security sued Wiz and demanded their full git version control history. Orca wanted to see "when features and functions were added, modified, or altered, including through engineers' notes and comments." The court recognized git history as relevant evidence in a software IP dispute. It ordered production of commit logs tied to two specific features. That ruling should concern you. Your commits record author name, email, timestamp, and content hash. Git chains them together cryptographically, replicates them across clones, and makes them discoverable in litigation. You are building a legal record whether you intend to or not. You already use git as a development tool. It is also a chain of custody for intellectual property. And you are probably destroying yours. A Cryptographic Chain of Custody Every git commit stores five things: the content of the change, the author's name and email, the author's timestamp, the committer's name and email, and the committer's timestamp. That commit is hashed using SHA-1 (or SHA-256 in newer repositories), and the hash incorporates the hash of the parent commit. Change one byte anywhere in the chain and every subsequent hash changes. This is a Merkle DAG. The same data structure that makes blockchains tamper-evident. Your commit history is a cryptographic proof linking each change to all previous changes. Git records three layers of timestamps. AuthorDate is when the content was written. CommitterDate is when it was finalized into the repository. And the server-side push timestamp, recorded by GitHub or GitLab, marks when the remote received the data. That third timestamp is outside the developer's control. A clone is a full copy of the entire history. Your collaborators, CI runners, and backup systems each hold an independent replica. Forensics researchers call this "evidence proliferation." Tampering with one copy does nothing if fifty others exist unchanged. Under Federal Rules of Evidence 902(14), data verified throu