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3 July 2025 (Washington, DC) - As LexisNexis announced this past May, there is a new policy at Law360 (the legal news service owned by LexisNexis) that requires every story pass through an AI-powered “bias” detection tool before publication.
The Law360 Union, which represents over 200 editorial staffers across the 350-person newsroom, has denounced the mandate since it went into effect in mid-May. On June 17th, unit chair Hailey Konnath sent a petition to management calling for the tool to be made completely voluntary:
“As journalists, we should be trusted to select our own tools of the trade to do our information-gathering, reporting and editing - not pressured to use unproven technology against our will”.
The petition was signed by over 90% of the union.
Law360 currently reaches over 2.8 million daily newsletter subscribers with breaking legal news and analysis. At the end of last year, the newsroom began experimenting with a suite of AI tools built in-house by LexisNexis to streamline story production. One of those tools analyzes the overall “bias” of article drafts and picks out lines of copy that should be edited to sound more “impartial.”
As our colleagues over at Neiman Media Lab noted:
Use of the tool, later known as the “bias indicator,” was voluntary until May 15. That’s when editor-in-chief Anne Urda notified the Law360 Union in an email that moving forward the use of AI tools was mandatory for all stories, particularly use cases like “applying a neutral voice to copy.” She also named several other mandatory use cases like headline drafting, story tagging, and “article refinement and editing.” In an email sent to editorial staff the following day, Urda said leadership was “exploring how to increase usage” of its AI tools through the mandate, but otherwise provided no explanation for the policy change.
The announcement came a few weeks after an executive at Law360’s parent company accused the newsroom of liberal political bias in its coverage of the Trump administration. At an April town hall meeting, Teresa Harmon, vice president of legal news at LexisNexis, cited unspecified reader complaints as evidence of editorial bias. She also criticized the headline of a March 28 story — “DOGE officials arrive at SEC with unclear agenda” — as an example. In the same town hall, Harmon suggested that the still experimental bias indicator might be an effective solution to this problem, according to two employees in attendance.
It’s unclear if Harmon had any direct role in implementing the subsequent AI mandate. Urda told multiple editorial staffers that the decision came from “above her.”
On June 12th, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration’s decision to deploy the National Guard in Los Angeles in response to anti-ICE protests was illegal. Law360 reporters were on the breaking story, publishing a news article just hours after the ruling (which has since been appealed). Under Law360’s new mandate though, the story first had to pass through the bias indicator.
Several sentences in the story were flagged as biased, including this one:
“It’s the first time in 60 years that a president has mobilized a state’s National Guard without receiving a request to do so from the state’s governor.”
According to the bias indicator, this sentence is “framing the action as unprecedented in a way that might subtly critique the administration.” It was best to give more context to “balance the tone.”
Another line was flagged for suggesting Judge Charles Breyer had “pushed back” against the federal government in his ruling, an opinion which had called the president’s deployment of the National Guard the act of “a monarchist.” Rather than “pushed back,” the bias indicator suggested a milder word, like “disagreed.”
The National Guard story is just one of hundreds of daily stories published by Law360 that are now expected to go through similar AI audits. Said Andrew Deck, staff writer at Neiman Media Lab:
I reviewed nearly a dozen examples of changes suggested on real Law360 stories. Editorial employees told me these examples were symptomatic of problems they faced in their everyday use of the bias indicator.
Often the bias indicator suggests softening critical statements and tries to flatten language that describes real world conflict or debates. One of the most common problems is a failure to differentiate between quotes and straight news copy. It frequently flags statements from experts as biased and treats quotes as evidence of partiality.
For a June 5th story covering the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on a workplace discrimination lawsuit, the bias indicator flagged a sentence describing experts who said the ruling came “at a key time in U.S. employment law.” The problem was that this copy, “may suggest a perspective.”
For a May 29th story covering a disability and sex discrimination lawsuit filed by an anesthesiologist, the bias indicator flagged a line that said the suit spotlighted challenges with ableism and sexism in the healthcare industry. This copy was flagged because it “frames the lawsuit as a representative example of systemic issues.” Instead, the bias indicator said the story should “state the facts of the lawsuit without suggesting its broader implications.”
Suffice to say, what these "edits" do is at odds with any attempt to deliver legal analysis. In most cases, reporters chose not to accept these edits, but they were still required to go through the motions.
As Deck noted:
Beyond problems with the bias indicator’s outputs, editorial staffers told me there’s been a lack of clarity from management about who in the editorial pipeline is responsible for using the tool and what the consequences will be for employees who refuse. Urda told union members that management is able to monitor individual employees’ usage and reserves the right to take disciplinary action.
And Abraham Gross, a senior reporter and co-chair of the union’s AI subcommittee:
Forcing journalists to use a tool on threat of discipline, with few formal guidelines and under constant surveillance, is not a recipe for innovation.
LexisNexis said its bias indicator was built by a LexisNexis product team on top of OpenAI’s GPT 4.0 model, one of the same large language models (LLMs) that powers ChatGPT.
The Union is, to put it mildly, pissed off. In one statement a spokesperson said:
We consider the mandate editorial interference in part because we don’t see it as something that is merited by our coverage. We defend our colleagues against claims of bias and suggestions that reporters are acting as product testers for their parent company. It’s been framed consistently as a business decision that comes from people outside the newsroom who aren’t journalists and who have not adequately consulted the reporters in the newsroom.
The union’s AI subcommittee is actively negotiating adoption guidelines for the bias indicator with management, a process that is guaranteed by the union’s collective bargaining agreement.
In rebuttal, a LexisNexis spokesman said:
We recognize that our subscribers depend on our Legal News brands for clear, unbiased reporting. We use technology to aid our journalists throughout their workflow and believe these investments contribute to our award-winning journalism. Ultimately, our editorial professionals are responsible for what we publish.
Obviously orbiting the union’s conversations about the mandate has been a fear of displacement by generative AI technologies.
This past May it was first reported that Business Insider was tracking its employees’ ChatGPT usage and that 70% of staffers were now using the product regularly which has resulted in so much negative feedback on its content. Once incisive and cutting, Business Insider content is now insipid.
Then just two weeks later, Business Insider announced it was laying off 21% of its staff and cited the publication’s efforts to go “all-in on AI” as one of the main factors in the decision.
The news did not assuage the concerns of Law360 employees. Fear of future layoffs in the Law360 newsroom as a result of this new AI push is the biggest concern of union members.
But Law360 is just the latest example of a newsroom turning to LLMs for easy answers to sticky questions around editorial bias. In March, The Los Angeles Times rolled out “Insights,” a feature that grades the partisan leaning of opinion stories for readers and produces AI-generated counterpoints to each story.
That feature came under heavy fire for “both-sides-ing” morally unambiguous topics like the Ku Klux Klan.
Similarly, Ground News, a news aggregation service used by many mainstream media companies, has folded AI into its user experience by using LLMs to generate “left,” “right,” and “center” leaning summaries of trending news stories.
Rather than putting an AI tool in the hands of readers to make their own judgments, the Law360 bias indicator sits within the editorial workflow, consistently imposing a more “neutral voice” onto the work of reporters and editors.
I'll leave you with Haylee Pearl, a senior editor at Law360, and the union’s deputy grievance chair:
“Neutral is such a loaded word in journalism. These are questions that animate our whole careers and it is something that people develop expertise on evaluating. It is not as simple as just clicking a button and getting a thumbs up or a thumbs down".
As I noted above, American journalism, especially legal media journalism, is already so insipid and flat in tone that it might have been ironed - and is now being turned into porridge by AI. How embarrassing.
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