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ARTICLE · 31 JULY 2026

Intelligence Piracy: The Expert Who Was Never Hired

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When a legal research startup trained its AI on lawyer memos derived from Westlaw's editorial summaries, it sparked a landmark copyright case that exposes how artificial intelligence extracts not just content, but the accumulated judgment and authority publishers spent decades building. As Google referral traffic plummets and AI-generated content farms proliferate, the question shifts from "was a copy made?" to "was the expert ever hired?"

United StatesIntellectual Property
Oliver Walsh
Oliver Walsh
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In 2020, a legal research startup called ROSS Intelligence went to Thomson Reuters and asked to license Westlaw. It was told no. Westlaw's owner was not about to hand its editorial content to a company building a rival product.

On the district court's findings, ROSS took another route. It paid a third party for tens of thousands of lawyer-written legal memos which had been compiled with reference to Westlaw's headnotes, the short editorial summaries of legal points that Thomson Reuters' editors had written and refined over decades. ROSS trained its search engine on those memos and launched a competing legal research tool 1.

No user of ROSS ever saw a Westlaw headnote. In February 2025, a federal judge held that ROSS had nonetheless infringed copyright in 2,243 of them, and rejected its fair use defence 2. ROSS disputes that finding. The Third Circuit heard argument on the appeal on 11 June 2026 and has not yet ruled, so nothing below should be read as settled law 3.

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