AI Prompts Used by Expert Are Subject to Compelled Discovery
A court has ruled that AI prompts used by an expert witness are subject to discovery in a case involving the Conservation Law Foundation and Shell Oil Company. The court disagreed with the plaintiff's arguments that these prompts were not relevant to the expert's methodology. As a result, the plaintiff is required to provide any AI prompts or queries used by the expert in her report preparation.
- ▪The court ruled that AI prompts used by an expert witness are discoverable under Rule 26(b).
- ▪The plaintiff argued that the prompts were not relevant, but the court found this position unconvincing.
- ▪The plaintiff must revise its responses to discovery requests regarding AI prompts used by the expert.
Reason Magazine files mainly under politics. We currently carry 519 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Reason Magazine |
| Canonical URL | https://reason.com/volokh/2026/05/26/ai-prompts-used-by-expert-are-subject-to-compelled-discovery/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 26 May 2026 15:01:57 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-26T15:07:49.943Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-26T15:07:49.943Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | lUijsQZAVPNa |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
AI in Court AI Prompts Used by Expert Are Subject to Compelled Discovery Eugene Volokh | 5.26.2026 11:01 AM From Judge Thomas O. Farrish (D. Conn.) last Monday in Conservation Law Foundation, Inc. v. Shell Oil Co.: The defendants, Shell Oil Company and others ("Defendants"), have moved the Court for an order compelling the plaintiff, Conservation Law Foundation, Inc. ("CLF"), to produce materials on which its expert witness, Dr. Naomi Oreskes, relied upon in producing her expert witness report…. The parties … had resolved all issues identified in the letter briefs except for "their dispute concerning Defendants' request for the prompts Dr.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Reason Magazine.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Reason Magazine
