Civil Law

Frozen Funds, Sinking Deals: Navigating bank delays in ship sales – who should pay?

In the fast-paced world of ship sale and purchase (S&P), timing is everything. When millions of dollars are expected to change hands promptly between counterparties, even short delays can derail closing timelines, lead to contractual defaults, and trigger costly disputes.

With the decline of traditional payment letters and conditional SWIFT messages in maritime transactions, escrow arrangements and balance pre-positioning have become the standard mechanism for de-risking payment flows in ship sales. However, this shift has introduced new complexities. Increasingly, … Read the rest

Civil Law

Pablo Arredondo and Joel Hron on Reasoning Models, Deep Research, and the Future of Legal AI

In this episode of The Geek in Review, we welcome back Pablo Arredondo, VP of CoCounsel at Thomson Reuters, along with Joel Hron, the company’s CTO. The conversation centers on the recent release of ChatGPT-5 and the rise of “reasoning models” that go beyond traditional language models’ limitations. Pablo reflects on his years of tracking neural net progress in the legal field, from escaping “keyword prison” to the current ability of AI to handle complex, multi-step legal reasoning. He describes … Read the rest

Civil Law

Bair Hugger MDL Dismisses Plaintiffs Who Ghosted Their Fact Sheets

This post comes from the non-Butler Snow side of the blog.

The Bair Hugger MDL has an up and down history. First, we lauded the district court’s Rule 702 rulings that led to summary judgment across the board for the defendant.  But then the Eighth Circuit reversed. The cases came back to the district court and the litigation has hobbled along since. That’s all about the substance of the cases. On procedure, the defendant is now batting two for two. … Read the rest

Civil Law

Global Regulation Tomorrow Plus: Mansion House and Leeds Reforms mini-series – The big picture

In the first episode of our new mini-series on the Chancellor’s Mansion House speech and Leeds Reforms, Jonathan Herbst, Hannah Meakin and Simon Lovegrove look at the big picture, including the key themes behind the government’s reforms and the latest on the Berne Financial Services Agreement.

Listen to our podcast here.

LexBlog… Read the rest

Civil Law

Publisher’s Platform: Mystery Listeria Outbreak Investigation needs to be Reopened

On July 24, 2024, John tested positive for Listeria, while in the ICU. John’s sample was genetically linked, by Whole Genome Sequencing, to a cluster of Listeria associated with potatoes from Mexico.

Here are the prior investigations by States, FDA and CDC:

https://www.foodsafetynews.com/files/2025/08/2025-3195-CARA-656-_Redacted-4.pdf

https://www.foodsafetynews.com/files/2025/08/2025-3195-CARA-775-_Redacted-1.pdf

https://www.foodsafetynews.com/files/2025/08/2025-3195-CARA-918-_Redacted-1.pdf

Figure: SNP-tree of sequences of REP strain uploaded to the public sequence repository at 
NCBI as of July 2025

On July 16, 2024, John was admitted to the hospital with a headache, facial drooping, … Read the rest

Civil Law

Article 25 of the Judicial Interpretation III of the Insurance Law in Judicial Practice

Focusing on Accidental Injury Insurance

I. Introduction of the Issue to Be Discussed

Article 25 of the Judicial Interpretation III of the Insurance Law stipulates that “Where it is difficult to determine whether the insured’s losses are caused by a covered event, a non-covered event or a disclaimer, if the parties concerned request that the insurer makes insurance payout, the People’s Court may support in accordance with the corresponding ratio.” Through searching by the author, this judicial interpretation is frequently … Read the rest