Law Disrupted Mailbag: Litigation Philosophy and the AI Revolution

Note: This transcript is generated from a recorded conversation and may contain errors or omissions. It has been edited for clarity but may not fully capture the original intent or context. For accurate interpretation, please refer to the original audio. 

JOHN QUINN: This is John Quinn and this is Law, disrupted and today we’re gonna do something a little bit different. Instead of my interviewing somebody, we put out a call to listeners for questions that they would be interested in hearing me answer. And we got a lot of them. So today I’m gonna try to answer some of those questions from listeners.

The producer, Alexis Hyde, is with me. Hi, Alexis.

ALEXIS HYDE: Hi, John.

JOHN QUINN: And she’s gonna select the questions and put me on the spot and I’m going to try to answer them. So with that, let’s get rolling, Alexis.

ALEXIS HYDE: You ready?

JOHN QUINN: Ready.

ALEXIS HYDE: Awesome. All right, first question: How do you learn to be a great litigator, or what are the qualities of a great litigator?

JOHN QUINN: Well, that’s really two questions in one. You know, I think, learning to be a great litigator, you need to work with great litigators. You need to… You can learn a lot by doing, but you need to see people in action as well. I mean, there’s a lot of it that you know, procedural and figuring out strategically, what’s your strategy going to be, how to execute on it, how do you get from A to Z which isn’t necessarily instinctive.

So I think it comes with watching great litigators, being part of teams, that you know, come up with strategies and execute on plans. And so I mean, that’s what I would say. You learn by doing, you know, there’s an expression that I think doctors use in medical school. My daughter told me this.

You watch one, you do one, then you teach one. And that’s kinda I think the career path of a litigator too. You have to watch, you have to do, and there comes a point where you become a role model.

ALEXIS HYDE: I like that for the future of teaching people. Second question then, or third, depending on how we’re counting. How would you distinguish Quinn Emanuel lawyers from other litigators at other firms?

JOHN QUINN: Well, we’ve always had a commitment from the founding of our firm when we were just four lawyers, that we wanted obviously to get the best possible result for the client. Our practice, litigation, there’s winners and there’s losers, and we wanna be winners, and we wanna be winners every time.

If a case can be won, we want to figure out the way to win it and to execute on that. And we’d like every client, and this was from the very beginning of the firm when we were first trying to stay busy, frankly, and didn’t have enough work to do, we wanted every client to be a repeat client. We wanted every client to come away from the experience with the belief that they got the best possible representation and that the cost was fair, so that down the road in a year or two or three when they had a matter or issue that would be appropriate for us, they’d remember us and wanna come back to us.

So I think that is very much in our DNA, a commitment to winning and a commitment to having the cost fair, and a commitment to making every client a repeat client.

ALEXIS HYDE: That leads in really well to the next question. Your email has a postscript that says, “Quinn Emanuel is the most feared law firm in the world.” How do you know that? What does that mean?

JOHN QUINN: Well, I mean, there’s actually, a data and a survey that supports that which, frankly, we had nothing to do with. We didn’t know it was happening when we first discovered this. There’s a consulting firm, I think it’s called BTI Consulting, which apparently does a survey every year, they say, of 350 general counsel at major companies around the world.

And they ask them the question, “If you have a litigation, if you face a litigation dispute, what is the law firm you least want to face on the other side?” And I’m proud to say that for the last five years running, it’s been Quinn Emanuel. So we translate that in shorthand as most feared. We’re kind of proud of that.

I’m not sure fear is necessarily the most important word there but we want to be respected as a firm that, as I said, knows if there’s a way that a case can be won, we’ll figure out what that is, and we have the ability to execute on that in the courtroom.

ALEXIS HYDE: Very good. Which also leads me to the next question. Do you think you need to be aggressive to be successful in the world of litigation?

JOHN QUINN: Yes and no. Aggression isn’t always the best response in a situation. It really depends on the situation. I mean, there’ll be some times when you won’t wanna be aggressive. You’ll wanna lay back and maybe have kind of a rope-a-dope strategy. It really depends on the circumstances, what your client’s goals are, the posture of the case, how strong your case is.

So aggression isn’t always the answer. But I will say we do have a belief at our firm that taking the initiative and being first to do things and trying to keep the other side on the back foot is in general, a good approach. I mean, we have a saying that the side that figures out first what will ultimately matter wins, and I really think there is something to that.

There’s so much time that goes into boiling the ocean in cases and going down paths and turning over stones that don’t really matter. If you can figure out early on what the ultimate issues are gonna be, what the decisive issues are gonna be, that’s an enormous advantage because I think that you get admissions and documents and answers in discovery that you otherwise would not get from the other side.

So aggression, I don’t know if that’s the word I would use, but having the initiative being the first mover is generally, I think, pretty important

ALEXIS HYDE: In your eyes, what are the most current, hot, new issues, types of claims, et cetera, that you would see emerging now in the litigation landscape?

JOHN QUINN: Well, surprise, surprise, everything relating to AI. There are so many interesting issues that AI is throwing up. We’ve heard stories in the news in the very recent past about agents that were being tested in a quote, unquote, “secure sandbox,” , at hyperscalers, that were supposed to give them projects to see if they could answer questions, solve problems.

And instead of doing that, the agent found a way to break out of that secure sandbox environment and hack into another site and steal the answer instead of come up with the answer itself. I mean and I think agentic AI in general is throwing up a lot of interesting issues. We’ve had a case recently where we represent Perplexity.

Perplexity has an agent which Perplexity users can deploy to go shopping for them. Amazon sued Perplexity because Amazon didn’t want Perplexity’s agents shopping on its website. It sued under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. I guess they didn’t want it because agents don’t have eyeballs and can’t be up-sold and the like.

We just got a decision out of the Ninth Circuit holding that the claim that they asserted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was not meritorious. But I mean, that’s an example, an interesting intersection of e-commerce and agentic AI type issues. There’s a lot of, so many IP issues, you know. You can’t patent things that are created by AI.

AI is discovering all kinds of inventions like molecules and industrial processes and the like. But unless a human has substantially contributed to the invention, you’re not gonna be able to patent that. Now, is that a hole, a loophole in patent, you know, that’ll potentially render patent law irrelevant?

Are we gonna need some legislation there? Remains to be seen. You know, what happens when you have product cases like the autonomous car goes off the road, causes some damage, and you ask the engineers what happened here, and they shrug their shoulders and they say, “We can’t tell you.

It was machine learning.” allocating responsibility for products in the AI whole AI field, I think is, is really interesting. Is it an AI software, is it even a product? We have these cases on teen mental health. We have cases on large language models allegedly encouraging people to engage in self-harm.

I mean, there are just a whole host of issues, and that without even getting into the data centers and the complex legal issues arising from those very complex financing structures with an SPV in the middle and layers of debt, securitized debt, bonds, private credit. Well, everything has to go smoothly for these, and those cross-default provisions.

Everything has to go perfectly for there not to be, you know, legal risks and defaults and the like. Many of these are behind schedule. We have now something like five hundred bans in the United States from communities to the State of New York. Five hundred bans from communities and towns to the whole State of New York on new data center construction.

And so we have these cases being brought, I mean, we’ve brought a couple of them against local, planning authorities and commissions and the like, which have tried to retroactively withdraw or change permits that have been given. So I just say, you know, beginning to end the fastest-growing area of litigation, to my knowledge are these things that relate to artificial intelligence.

ALEXIS HYDE: Yeah. With how fast AI moves, do you think litigation can keep up?

JOHN QUINN: You know, it’s interesting. You know, there are some now, some companies that basically discover lawsuits using AI. They hoover up all kinds of information, information on permits required for businesses, ingredients like FDA requirements, all kinds of regulatory statutory requirements, and then they scour, you know, websites and regulatory filings and the like, and find mismatches.

What companies are engaged in what type of business, where they don’t have the required disclosures or permits or whatever that is. So basically, these companies discover lawsuits, class actions, and, you know, if you’re interested, you can subscribe to the service, and they’ll serve them up to you.

So I think we’re going to see not only more litigation relating to AI, as I was discussing a moment ago, but more litigation, sort of compliance related litigation that’s discovered by AI.

ALEXIS HYDE: Yeah.

JOHN QUINN: I also think, by the way, I think it may mean that lawsuits will be resolved sooner. If you have total disclosure, you know, all cards on the table, enabled by AI, maybe parties will be able to sort of handicap the strengths and weaknesses of their cases at an earlier time and maybe reach earlier resolutions.

ALEXIS HYDE: Right. So then even though the AI is moving fast, the other people can use the AI tools to move just as fast to keep up.

JOHN QUINN: Yeah, as I say, it may generate new, it’s generating new cases, but it also may give transparency which will speed up settlements. Now, maybe that’s wishful thinking, but I think that’s one possible outcome.

ALEXIS HYDE: Interesting. 

JOHN QUINN: Alexis, thanks for participating today. You were so good at propounding those questions. I hope I was half as good at trying to answer them.

ALEXIS HYDE: I learned from the best.

JOHN QUINN: This is John Quinn, and this has been Law, disrupted.