Insights · IP exposure · 30 Apr 2026
Norton Rose Fulbright, 2025:
47% of organizations expecting IP disputes cite AI as a factor.
The annual litigation-trends survey GCs and CTOs at IP-critical organizations read the day it publishes. What the 2025 edition said about AI tools, trade secrets, and where the next IP dispute comes from.
Norton Rose Fulbright’s Annual Litigation Trends Survey is one of the most-cited litigation benchmarks in corporate legal departments. The 2025 edition surveyed in-house counsel across the United States and Canada. The IP-and-AI finding is unambiguous:
“Nearly half (47%) of organizations expecting IP dispute growth cite AI tools as a contributing factor; 44% specifically attribute that growth to trade-secret vulnerabilities.”
The mechanism is the one the Samsung incident made famous in April 2023: three separate leaks of source code, equipment yield data, and internal meeting notes into ChatGPT within one month. Samsung banned the tool company-wide by May 1, 2023. The litigation-trends data says the same pattern is now showing up in dispute pipelines across both Canadian and US in-house legal departments.
The supporting context comes from the Workleap / ShareGate 2025 benchmark: nearly 1 in 3 organizations across North America and Europe have already reported an AI-driven data exposure incident. That data point made it into the Cassels “Trade Secrets Year in Review” bulletins Canadian GCs read each quarter, and into the Bennett Jones commentary on the U.S. v. Heppner ruling (2025) — the case that held AI communications with Claude lack confidentiality protection.
Read the source
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Norton Rose Fulbright — 2025 Annual Litigation Trends Survey
Source for the 47% / 44% figures. Filter by year for the 2025 edition; US and Canadian respondents are reported together.
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Bennett Jones — AI Conversations with Claude (commentary on U.S. v. Heppner, 2025)
Canadian legal commentary flagging the 2025 ruling that AI communications lack confidentiality protection — a direct trade-secret liability signal for non-US organizations.
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Cassels — Trade Secrets Year in Review
The Canadian counterpart Canadian GCs read each year alongside the Norton Rose survey. The trade-secret loss thesis is consistent across both.
Why this matters
If you are a General Counsel, CLO, or CTO at an IP-critical organization — technology, pharma, life sciences, engineering, mining, management consulting — the Norton Rose survey is one of the documents your peers are showing the board. The fear it surfaces is concrete: the asset your company was built on (source code, formulations, clinical protocols, proprietary methods) is leaving through unmonitored AI prompts and you cannot tell the acquirer, the investor, or the auditor what left. Mandate produces the structured record — what AI tool, what content category, what policy decided what — that answers that question before it is asked.
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