Curtis Issues AI-Generated, Human-Augmented SCOTUS Global Business Review

The U.S. Supreme Court has ended another term full of blockbuster decisions affecting domestic affairs. Several of its decisions also have repercussions for international business and world affairs.

Curtis’ appellate lawyers have curated a selection of cases and prepared this report to assist U.S. and foreign companies evaluate emerging legal trends that may impact their businesses within the United States and beyond. Some key takeaways from this term include:

Courts must exercise independent judgment in interpreting statutes rather than deferring to federal agencies, now that the Court has overruled the Chevron doctrine. While businesses may have better odds of successfully challenging agency action as a result of this case, the regulatory environment may become less certain if companies cannot rely on agency decisions as much as before.

Courts must decide whether an arbitration clause in one contract supersedes a conflicting forum selection clause in another, even when the arbitration clause refers arbitrability issues to an arbitrator. This decision, which affects both domestic and international arbitrations, highlights the importance of having consistent dispute resolution provisions across relevant agreements.

Copyright owners may recover damages for any timely filed infringement claim, regardless of when the infringement occurred. The Court assumed the applicable three-year statute of limitations started to run when the infringing conduct was or should have reasonably been discovered, but has not yet explicitly endorsed this “discovery rule” under the Copyright Act.

Whistleblowers need only prove that their protected activity was a contributing factor in any adverse employment action under Sarbanes-Oxley, and not that their employer acted with “retaliatory intent” or animus. Employers may still defend against these claims by showing that they would have taken the same decision regardless of the protected activity.

The First Amendment does not foreclose restrictions on trademarks that use a living person’s name without consent. Such marks are properly denied registration under the Lanham Act.

Courts must stay rather than dismiss an action when arbitration is compelled and a party requests a stay under the Federal Arbitration Act. This decision, which affects both domestic and international arbitrations, preserves that status quo and ensures that courts maintain their supervisory role in case the arbitration process breaks down or parties need post-arbitration remedies.

Pure omissions in public filings are not actionable by private parties under SEC Rule 10b-5(b), but the SEC retains power to enforce its own rules.

An employee challenging a job transfer as discriminatory must show some harm to an employment term or condition under Title VII, but that harm need not be significant. Multinational companies with international transfer programs should consider whether their job transfer policies may be subject to challenge under this less stringent standard.

The First Amendment protects social media platforms’ editorial curating of user content, but laws regulating this process may be subject to free-speech challenges in some cases.

U.S. shareholders may be taxed for the unrepatriated and undistributed income of their U.S. controlled foreign corporations, as confirmed by the Court’s decision to uphold the constitutionality of the Mandatory Repatriation Tax.

A Word About Our Process

In preparing this year’s report, we did things a little differently. As part of Curtis’ ongoing efforts to develop its AI capabilities, we used Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, a general-purpose large language model, to generate the first draft of the case summaries. This process involved uploading last year’s report and the Supreme Court decisions we selected into Claude’s chatbot and prompting it to summarize each case using the same format and style from last year’s report.

Consistent with Anthropic’s “human-in-the-loop” recommendation and our internal AI policy, our lawyers carefully reviewed, edited, and augmented Claude’s outputs to ensure accuracy, appropriateness and completeness based on their independent analysis of the cases. We noticed that some of Claude’s outputs were more helpful than others, and none of them were sophisticated enough to displace human oversight. We are disclosing this process in accordance with Anthropic’s disclosure requirements. Nothing in this disclosure implies Anthropic’s affiliation, endorsement, or sponsorship.

We generated the image on the cover of this report using the AI image generator, Playground. Our prompt requested an image of the Supreme Court with a futuristic world globe in the background in an elegant, modern style.

Overall, this experiment allowed us to explore a potential use (or “use case”) for generative AI in the practice of law. We continue to explore other AI tools and use cases. One lesson we’ve learned so far is that, while generative AI may make us faster, our most valuable asset remains our human experience and judgment.

The team has analyzed the following cases:

• Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo & Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce
• Coinbase, Inc. v. Suski
• Warner Chappell Music, Inc. v. Nealy
• Murray v. UBS Securities, LLC
• Vidal v. Elster
• Smith v. Spizzirri
• Macquarie Infrastructure Corp. v. Moab Partners, L.P.
• Muldrow v. City of St. Louis
• Moody v. NetChoice, LLC & NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton
• Moore v. United States

Read our full report here.