CBA Record January-February 2026

By Sharon Nolan, CBA Marketing Director C BA President Judge Nichole C. Patton’s 2025-2026 initia tive, AI 2035: The Legal Profession and the Judiciary in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, is off and running. This series dives deep into one of the most critical issues facing our profession, with expert-led sessions that critically examine AI and offer practical guidance for it. Members are invited to join any of the 10 committees to receive email notice of future meetings. View a list and sign up at www.chicagobar.org/AI2035Commit tees. Past educational sessions are available on demand at Learn. ChicagoBar.org (please note, archived versions of committee meetings do not receive IL MCLE credit)—enter “AI” into the search bar for a list of future and past meetings. Courtrooms across the country struggle with limited availabil ity of interpreters, inconsistent captioning, accessibility accom modations, and literacy challenges. Conor Malloy, Director of Innovation at CARPLS, a legal aid nonprofit, joined the AI and Courtroom Operations Committee to discuss how AI has the potential to be a bridge to improved courtroom operations, espe cially for self-represented litigants. He pointed out that AI can assist in four key areas: legal trans lation (e.g., turning an order into plain language); document simplification (e.g., summarizing an agreement for basic under standing at a grade-school level); multilingual access; and acces sibility (e.g., auto captions and more). Malloy’s presentation also included several demonstrations of AI in action, such as turning an order into a plain language document using ChatGPT. Key takeaways from the session include: l Check out apps like Speechify, a free AI voice generator, for simple language translation. For real-time transcription, try Otter.AI, Zoom, Microsoft CoPilot, and others. And the AVA app aids people who are hearing-impaired and hard of hearing. l To explore how AI can be used in the future, pilot test trans lating complex language into plain language for use by self represented litigants. Share validated AI workflows statewide and create best practices to accelerate the responsible adoption AI as a Bridge: Language Access and Accessibility in the Courtroom

of AI in the courts. Committee co-chairs are Judge Kerrie Laytin, Municipal Divi sion, Circuit Court of Cook County, and Maggie Mendenhall Casey, Deputy Corporation Counsel for the City of Chicago. Deepfakes and Cybersecurity Reena Bajowala, a partner at Greenberg Traurig, spoke at the AI and Data Privacy and Cybersecurity Committee about deepfakes, security and risks, and ethical application. A deepfake is a video, photo, or audio recording that seems real but has been manipu lated by generative AI, typically for malicious purposes. Bajowala noted that detection of deepfakes is a major issue because they are evolving faster than the ability to detect them. Bajowala provided several examples of security incidents during her presentation. She noted that potential risks include the right of publicity, defamation and inappropriate content, manipulation and disinformation, intellectual property, and security. Two specific areas of security concern include (1) the use of deepfakes to perpetrate a security incident or otherwise defraud individuals, such as a phishing video or audio requesting a password rest; and (2) the use of AI to create adversarial attacks on a system that result in harmful outputs, such as commandeer ing a system to create a deepfake. Other takeaways from the session include: l Proposed Federal Rule of Evidence 707, which would subject “machine-generated” evidence to the same admissibility stan dard as expert testimony, is open for public comment until February 16, 2026 (www.uscourts.gov/forms-rules/proposed amendments-published-public-comment). l Mendones v. Cushman and Wakefield, Inc., provides a caution ary tale in which a California Superior Court determined audio and video submitted as evidence by the plaintiff were deepfakes. See Ariel Mendones v. Cushman and Wakefield, Inc., No. 23CV028772 (Cal. Super. Ct. Alameda Cnty. Sept. 9, 2025). Committee co-chairs are Judge Michael T. Mullen, Chan cery Division, Circuit Court of Cook County, and Ronak Shah, Molson Coors.

10 January/February 2026