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AI Law

“We are telling our clients: You should proceed with caution here.”

— Alexandria Gutiérrez Swette, a lawyer at New York-based law firm Kobre & Kim, commenting on a ruling by a federal judge in New York stating that the former CEO of a bankrupt financial services company could not shield his AI chats from prosecutors pursuing securities fraud charges against him. In the wake of the ruling, attorneys have been advising that conversations with chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT could be demanded by prosecutors in criminal cases or by litigation adversaries in civil cases.

Solar Farmland

“Many communities want to decarbonize and probably theoretically support renewable energy. When it’s your community and your backyard, balancing these processes so people feel like they’ve had a say without creating so many veto points that nothing can get done, I think, is the trick. And it’s not easy to do.”

— Juniper Katz, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts who focuses on environmental policy, discussing the push/pull between landowners and local governments regarding renewable energy projects. A 2025 Columbia University study found that from 2023 to 2024, there was a 16% increase in local laws across 44 states restricting such projects.

Protecting Mobile Homes

“If it’s 1994 or newer, you have options. If it’s older, there really aren’t many,”

— John Gardner, principal at Lee County Insurance Agency and one of the top writers of mobile home coverage in Florida. Insurance agents and others in the state agreed that, 24 months after St. Petersburg-headquartered American Mobile began canceling policies, finding coverage for many mobile and manufactured homes remains difficult and eye-poppingly expensive. The average mobile home annual premium in parts of southwest Florida is now about $5,000—more than that for some non-mobile, single-family dwellings in a comparable area.

E-Bike Claims Quadruple

“Sometimes, what looks like an e-bike or is marketed as an e-bike is not a bike at all. We are seeing a surge of safety incidents on our sidewalks, parks, and streets. Bike riders and parents: If your or your teen’s electric two-wheeled vehicle goes too fast, it might be a motorcycle or a moped—not an e-bike.”

— California Attorney General Rob Bonta on e-bike risks. The popularity of e-bikes has led to a rise in claims involving battery-related fire risks and rider injuries. The number of claims quadrupled from roughly 1,000 claims in 2021 to more than 4,000 claims in 2025, a Verisk report found.

NYC Insurance Plan

“The skyrocketing cost of insurance is putting affordable, rent-stabilized housing at risk and risks setting back our efforts to build a more affordable city. This groundbreaking effort will use the City’s purchasing power to lower insurance premiums, helping our own investments in affordable housing go farther and reducing operating costs for owners of rent stabilized housing. This is just one step in how we’re working to bring down housing costs across the board.”

— Leila Bozorg, New York City deputy mayor for Housing and Planning, on a plan to lower the cost of property and liability insurance for affordable and rent-stabilized housing through a city-run insurance program by 2027.

Omaha Sinkholes

“It’s great for growing corn, but terrible for building roads.”

— Omaha, Nebraska, City Engineer Austin Rowser on sinkhole hazards. Much of Omaha sits atop a fine-grained sediment called loess, which can be easily carried away by water, leaving behind gaps underground. Omaha’s sinkholes are generally shallow and often result from human-made infrastructure interacting with the fine-grained sediment. Reported cave-ins have decreased in recent years from more than 500 in 2021 to about 340 last year, but as Omaha’s underground infrastructure ages, it could put the city at greater risk of sinkholes, geologists said.