Conservation Law Foundation v. Shell (expert AI prompts)

What happened

The Conservation Law Foundation sued Shell Oil Company and related defendants in the District of Connecticut. The foundation's expert, Dr. Naomi Oreskes, is a historian of climate change science. Her report was served in May 2025 and she was deposed in September 2025.

According to reporting on the record, Dr. Oreskes and a research assistant used a commercially available generative AI system to filter Shell's document production down to a subset of potentially relevant documents. Dechert describes the system as GPT-4o running on a private Microsoft Azure deployment. The report disclosed the search terms and their frequencies. It did not disclose the prompts. Shell moved to compel them.

The foundation resisted on three grounds. It argued that the prompts fell outside the scope of discovery under Rule 26. It argued that the parties had agreed not to take discovery of each other's "expert notes, drafts, or communications needed by, and made during, the report drafting process," and that the prompts were notes. And it argued that it had already produced the search terms, which were what mattered.

What the court did

On May 18, 2026, Magistrate Judge Thomas O. Farrish granted the motion to compel. The order states that "an expert witness's methodology is fair ground for discovery" and that, on these facts, the process by which Dr. Oreskes culled the defendants' production into a working subset "is an aspect of that methodology."

The court did not read the parties' agreement as covering the prompts. As reproduced by the Volokh Conspiracy, the order found that the point was "not so obvious as to be 'quite clear,'" and so the agreement was not a sound basis for denying discovery otherwise within Rule 26(b). The foundation was ordered to revise its responses to any interrogatories or document requests calling for "any artificial intelligence prompts and/or queries used by Dr. Oreskes or her team in the course of producing her expert witness report" by June 1, 2026. Reporting on the order notes that a response stating no prompts exist would carry exposure to sanctions under Rule 37(b) if it proved false.

Where it stands

The foundation filed an objection with the district judge under Rule 72(a) on June 2, 2026, and sought an emergency stay. Shell opposed, arguing that "AI is not entitled to any special, unwritten discovery rules." According to Mayer Brown and Dechert, the district court stayed the order while the objection is decided. No ruling on the objection was located as of September 11, 2026. The magistrate judge's order is therefore not in effect, and it may be modified or set aside.

The obligation it engaged

The dispute turns on Clause 5 of the Standard, reproducible analysis. Culling a production with a system is part of the method. If the instructions given to the system are not preserved, no one can rerun the culling or test what it left out, and the governing test fails at its first step: an examiner working from the primary sources cannot reproduce which documents the expert chose to read.

Clause 7, contemporaneous record, is what makes a request like Shell's easy to answer. An expert who logs each prompt as it is used can produce the log. An expert who did not has to reconstruct it under an order carrying sanctions exposure. Clause 8, disclosure, is also engaged. The report disclosed the search terms but not the prompts, and the gap between the two became the discovery fight. Whatever the district judge decides on the objection, the safer course for an expert is to treat prompts as part of the method from the start.

Sources

• U.S. District Court, D. Conn. (copy of the CourtListener PDF) · May 18, 2026
  Order granting motion to compel, ECF 970 (May 18, 2026)
• Mayer Brown · June 10, 2026
  Court Orders Disclosure of Expert Witness's AI Prompts: What Litigators Need to Know
• Dechert · June 30, 2026
  Magistrate Judge Orders Production of AI Prompts Used by Expert Witness
• eDiscovery Today (citing Law360) · June 12, 2026
  Enviro Group Can't Delay Handing Over AI Prompts, Shell Contends

What could not be confirmed

The stay order and the name of the district judge deciding the objection were not located. No ruling on the Rule 72(a) objection was found as of September 11, 2026. The order itself does not name the AI system; the GPT-4o and Azure description is Dechert's. Part of the order's reasoning is quoted from the Volokh Conspiracy's reproduction rather than from the copy of the order that was opened.