ROSS & Westlaw.. The gift that keeps on giving.
Here’s the latest from law sites
In a redacted brief filed Nov. 19 with the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Thomson Reuters urged the court to affirm the Delaware district court’s ruling that ROSS Intelligence infringed Westlaw’s copyrights by copying thousands of its attorney-written headnotes to train an AI-powered legal research tool.
“Copying protectable expression to create a competing substitute isn’t innovation: it’s theft,” the brief asserts. “This basic principle is as true in the AI context as it is in any other.”
The 85-page brief (which you can read here), signed by Kirkland & Ellis partners Dale Cendali, Joshua Simmons and Miranda Means, defends the copyrightability of Westlaw’s headnotes, the editorial summaries written by its attorney-editors, and portrays them as a hallmark of creative legal analysis rather than mere factual summaries.
“For over a hundred years and as recently as 2020,” TR’s brief argues, “the Supreme Court has upheld ‘the reporter’s copyright interest in explanatory materials including headnotes.” Citing Callaghan v. Myers (1888) and Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org (2020), TR calls headnotes “a paradigmatic example of protectable material,” and argues that the Delaware court was right to treat 2,243 of them as copyrightable works.
TR asserts that its headnotes are crafted through numerous creative editorial choices — how to phrase the point of law, how many headnotes to create, which facts or concepts to include, which case passages to link and how to categorize them within the West Key Number System. These choices, TR says, easily satisfy the minimal creativity required by Feist.
ROSS, the brief says, “may want to ignore the Supreme Court’s numerous statements that headnotes are protectable, as it did in its opening brief, but this Court must follow binding precedent.”
‘Knew It Could Not Legally Access Westlaw’
TR’s account portrays ROSS as a commercial actor that knowingly copied Westlaw to build a rival product. After being denied a Westlaw license, ROSS allegedly hired the outsourcing firm LegalEase Solutions to scrape Westlaw data and convert headnotes into “question and answer” pairs for training its AI model.
Read more commentary
The Brief
[pdf-embedder url=”https://practicesource.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/2025-11-19-ROSS-Oppo-Redacted.pdf”]
