Cali judge blasts Metas attorney-client privilege swag hats, rejects companys request to use AI for document review

A federal judge blasted Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta for using attorney-client privilege to conceal thousands of potentially explosive legal documents related to kids’ social media addiction – stating that she had “never seen a company whose employees are so taken” with exploiting the legal loophole.The harsh words surfaced during a testy Oct.9 hearing in California federal court, just a couple of weeks after plaintiffs revealed that Instagram had made swag hats for its employees with the phrase “attorney-client privilege” to celebrate the 2024 launch of Instagram’s Teen Accounts.

Critics previously lambasted the hats as an “utterly sick” joke about concealing explosive legal documents.In the case in which the hat swag surfaced, a coalition of school districts have accused Meta of fueling a teen mental health crisis.“I have never seen a company whose employees are so taken with the attorney-client privilege that they’d have caps made,” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said during the hearing, according to a transcript obtained by The Post.Meta attorney Ashley Simonsen fired back at the judge, asserting that the hats had “nothing to do” with “whether outside counsel properly applied the privilege in this case.”Simonsen appeared to have interrupted the judge with her comment, prompting an irked Gonzalez Rogers to reply, “You need to stop talking when I start whether you like it or not.”“A further review is required, period,” the judge added.In a bizarre twist, Gonzalez Rogers also shot down a request by Meta’s Simonsen to use an AI model to speed up review of the withheld documents – asserting that the court couldn’t trust the model to be reliable without more information.“I don’t trust AI, obviously, as much as you do,” the judge said.“The only way that argument would have any legs is if you trained a model on your own, and obviously all of the training would have to be done and disclosed — all of it — and all of ...