by For general counsel managing active litigation exposure, generative AI has created a litigation communications problem that did not exist two years ago. AI-generated content is now making its way into legal filings, including in cases handled by the U.S. Justice Department.
In a July 16 order, Chief Judge Hala Y. Jarbou of the Western District of Michigan called out a DOJ lawyer for citing an appeals court case, Taylor v. Hott, that does not exist. The citation pointed to a page number that belonged to an entirely different case, Atkins v. CGI Technologies & Solutions, about commercial arbitration, not immigration bond law (Source: Bloomberg Law, 2026).
Jarbou framed this as a story about artificial intelligence. The more precise reading is that the model performed as designed and the verification step never happened.
Generative AI produces plausible-sounding output with complete confidence and no accountability. The lawyer’s obligation was to check that output against the record, and that step was skipped.
As AI-generated content enters court filings, leaked documents and viral social posts, corporate communications teams inherit the same challenge legal teams face: establishing what is real before deciding what to say.
Why Verification Is Now a Litigation Communications Function
For as long as litigation communications has existed as a discipline, it has rested on an unspoken division of labor. Lawyers establish the record: what is true, what is disputed, what the filings say. Communications advisors take that record and decide how to talk about it. That arrangement assumed legal review functioned as a backstop, and that anything reaching a court filing had, by definition, been checked.
That assumption no longer holds. When an AI-generated citation can reach a court filing, communications teams must treat a document’s legal provenance as the starting point for verification rather than proof of accuracy.
What In-House Counsel Should Verify Before Responding
Verification is now a communications responsibility as much as a legal one. In practice, four questions that used to belong almost exclusively to lawyers now sit with the communications function:
- Has the document been authenticated, and by whom?
- Does the citation say what it claims to say?
- Is the claim disputed, and by which party on the record?
- Could the underlying material have been generated or altered by AI?
Each question is routine. What has changed is who asks it, and how early in the response.
The cost of skipping them falls unevenly. A company that responds publicly to an allegation, a leaked document or a citation that later proves fabricated loses more than the argument at hand. It loses the presumption that it can distinguish a verified fact from a machine-generated invention. Litigation tests credibility simultaneously in the courtroom, in the press and in front of shareholders, and that presumption is close to the only asset a communications team fully controls.
How Fast Should a Company Respond During Litigation?
Speed remains essential, and no crisis communications advisor will tell a client to sit on a legitimate issue for a week out of caution. The discipline required is narrower and harder to retrofit: confirming what is true before it shapes what gets said publicly. Until recently, most teams could assume someone else had already completed that step.
Who Verifies What: Setting the Protocol Before the Filing Goes Public
Companies close that gap by establishing protocols before litigation becomes a media event: who verifies a new claim, who decides whether it warrants a response, who signs off on the language, and who is authorized to speak on the record. Companies with that structure in place before a filing goes public respond within hours rather than days, and without retracting anything afterward. Montieth & Company works alongside in-house counsel and outside litigation teams to run that verification step before a public response goes out. Examples of that work are in our client case studies.
How to Judge Whether a Claim Deserves a Response
The same discipline applies to gauging media attention itself. A viral post, a hostile filing or a provocative commentator can dictate a company’s communications agenda when reach gets mistaken for relevance. The better test asks who is spreading a claim, how credible that source is, whether the story is gaining or losing momentum, and whether the company can respond to it with facts it’s prepared to stand behind publicly.
As AI-generated content becomes harder to distinguish from the real thing, and as mass tort and financial-services litigation continues to generate the kind of high-volume, high-velocity coverage that outpaces legal timelines, that judgment call is becoming a competitive advantage. The companies best positioned in the next wave of high-profile litigation will be the ones that decided, before the complaint was filed, which headlines were worth answering.
Verification now sits inside the litigation communications function itself, rather than upstream with legal review. Montieth & Company advises in-house counsel to name the person accountable for that step before a filing, a leak or a viral claim forces the question.
Learn more about how Montieth & Company approaches litigation communications: Litigation PR