Artificial Intelligence

October 1, 2026

Illinois Just Created an AI Cabinet. What Does That Mean for Businesses Using AI?

What happened? Governor Pritzker established the Illinois AI Cabinet on September 22, 2026. The Cabinet’s mandate includes AI liability, cybersecurity, privacy, contracts, data centers, and whether existing legal remedies are sufficient when AI causes harm.

Who should pay attention? Any Illinois business that uses AI tools in its operations, including hiring software, customer service automation, marketing platforms, contract review tools, data analytics, and scheduling systems.

What should you do right now? You do not need to wait for the Cabinet to issue recommendations to start protecting yourself. The legal risks around AI use are already real under existing Illinois and federal law. Now is the time to audit how your business uses AI and make sure the foundation is solid before new rules arrive.

September 24, 2026

Can Illinois Businesses Record Phone Calls With AI Note Takers?

by George Bellas

Only if every single person on the call actually consents, and that requirement is a lot stricter than most businesses using these tools realize. Illinois is one of the toughest states in the country on recording consent, and AI note takers, Otter, Fireflies, Zoom’s AI companion, Microsoft Teams transcription, and similar tools, don’t get a pass just because a person didn’t personally hit a record button. The law treats the AI tool exactly the same as a tape recorder, and in some cases, it creates a second layer of legal risk most businesses have never even considered.

Illinois Law Doesn’t Care How Sophisticated the Tool Is

Illinois is an all-party consent state meaning every participant in a private conversation has to consent before it’s recorded, whether that conversation happens in person, over the phone, or through a video call. The statute defines an eavesdropping device broadly enough to cover any technology capable of recording a conversation, and it explicitly applies to AI transcription tools the same way it applies to a phone recorder. There’s no carveout for automation, no exception because the recording exists to generate a summary instead of an audio file, and no exception because only one person on the call actually chose to turn the tool on.

September 18, 2026

Can ChatGPT Be Used as Evidence in Court?

by George Bellas

Yes, and it already has been, in a criminal arson trial and in a 250 million dollar business dispute, both in 2026. If you’ve ever typed something into ChatGPT that you wouldn’t want read aloud in a deposition, courts are now treating that conversation exactly the way they’d treat an email or a text message. Not private. Not protected. Fully discoverable.

For business owners, this isn’t an abstract technology story. It’s a direct warning about how you and your employees are using AI tools for anything touching contracts, disputes, or business decisions.

The Case That Should Worry Every Business Owner

August 17, 2026

Can Someone Sue Your Business Over an AI Hallucination?

by George Bellas

Yes. It has already happened, and the legal defense you might be counting on, “the AI said it, not us,” has already failed in court.

If your business uses any AI tool that talks to customers, drafts content, or answers questions, whether that’s a customer service chatbot, an AI powered search feature on your website, or a marketing team using generative AI to write copy, you need to understand that your business is legally responsible for what that tool says. Not the AI company that built it. You.

The Case That Should Change How You Think About This

August 3, 2026

Congress Has Not Passed a Federal AI Law. Here Is the Patchwork Your Business Is Actually Living Under

by George Bellas

If you have been waiting for Washington to hand down one clear rulebook for how your business can use AI, stop waiting. It is not coming this year, and it may not be coming next year either.

Congress has not passed a comprehensive federal AI law. There is no single statute you can read to know what is required of your business. What exists instead is a fast growing collection of state laws, agency guidance, and executive orders that do not agree with each other, do not cover the same ground, and in some cases are actively fighting over who gets to regulate you at all. That is not a future risk. That is the actual legal environment your business is operating in right now, today, whether you have looked into it or not.

Why Everyone Assumed Federal Law Was Coming

July 28, 2026

Hackers Are Now Targeting AI Systems, Not Just Your Network. What That Means for Your Business Liability

by George Bellas

For twenty years, “cybersecurity” meant one thing for most business owners: protect the network. Firewalls, endpoint protection, employee training on phishing emails. You knew what you were defending and you generally knew what your insurance covered if you failed.

That model is already out of date.

Attackers have shifted targets. Instead of only breaking into your servers, they are going after the AI tools your business now runs on: the chatbot on your website, the AI agent your vendor plugged into your CRM, the automated workflow that reads your inbox and drafts responses. And the legal and insurance world has not caught up to the speed of that shift, which means a lot of business owners are exposed in ways they do not know about yet.

July 24, 2026

Can a Business Owner Use AI to File a Law Suit Without a Lawyer?

by George Bellas

Generative artificial intelligence is changing pro se litigation. Law.com reports that lawyers and judges see more self-represented litigants using AI to prepare court filings, sometimes effectively and sometimes with serious errors. The increase is also causing courts to reconsider their case-management procedures and the guidance they provide to self-represented litigants.

A business owner may believe, “My company was cheated, so I can file the complaint myself.” But, if the claim belongs to the company, the owner’s AI-generated complaint may create an unauthorized representation problem before the merits are ever reached.

The Seventh Circuit of the Federal Court recently observed that approximately 60% of its caseload includes at least one self-represented party (pro se litigation). AI did not create pro se litigation, but it has dramatically made it easier to produce a complaint, brief, or motion that looks as though it was prepared by a lawyer.

July 23, 2026

Your AI Vendor Contract Is Missing the Most Important Clause

by George Bellas

Everyone is talking about what AI can do.

Write marketing copy. Analyze contracts. Screen resumes. Answer customer questions. Summarize meetings. Build code. What far fewer people are talking about is what happens when AI gets something wrong.

That is where I see businesses getting into trouble.

July 16, 2026

The New Wave of Deepfake Fraud Is Coming for Small Businesses

by George Bellas

The call comes in on a Tuesday afternoon.

It sounds exactly like your business partner. Or your CFO. Or the vendor you have worked with for six years. The voice has the same cadence, the same phrasing, the same slight accent you have always recognized. Maybe there is a video call and the face matches too.

There is an urgent wire transfer. A confidential acquisition. A vendor payment that needs to go out before end of business. The request is unusual but the person making it is someone you know, someone you trust, someone you would wire money for without a second thought.

July 13, 2026

Your Employees Are Uploading Company Secrets to ChatGPT. What Happens If They Do?

by George Bellas

Your employee is not trying to steal anything.

They are trying to finish a task faster. They paste your pricing model into ChatGPT to reformat it as a client proposal. They upload a draft contract and ask the AI to clean up the language. They feed your source code into the prompt to find a bug. They summarize a confidential internal investigation report to save time writing it up.

None of this feels like a security incident. It feels like using a tool.