Morgan & Morgan's Own AI Just Got One of Its Partners Bounced From the Harvard Morgue Case

Boston, May 19. Justice Kenneth Salinger of Suffolk County Superior Court ruled that a Morgan & Morgan partner could not appear in the Harvard Medical School morgue case, because eight cases the firm's AI platform invented in a Wyoming hoverboard brief now traveled with him. Salinger wrote that the partner "has made no showing that he has learned from his mistakes."

The partner is a senior lawyer at Morgan & Morgan, ranked 42nd by attorney headcount in the 2025 NLJ 500. He is also among the most recognizable plaintiffs' lawyers in the country. He had moved to appear pro hac vice in Wilder v. President & Fellows of Harvard College. Wilder is the consolidated mass tort over the alleged theft and sale of body parts from the Harvard Medical School morgue. It is one of the highest-profile plaintiffs' dockets in Massachusetts this year. Salinger said no.

The order is two pages. The reasoning is older than the order. In February 2025, U.S. District Judge Kelly H. Rankin of the District of Wyoming sanctioned the partner, a Morgan & Morgan associate, and co-counsel Taly Goody of the Goody Law Group in Wadsworth v. Walmart, a defective-hoverboard products case. The associate had filed a brief citing nine federal cases, eight of which Rankin found did not exist. The fabricated citations came back as Westlaw-format strings from MX2.law, Morgan & Morgan's internally branded artificial-intelligence platform. Rankin wrote one line that has followed Morgan & Morgan filings since. "The problem with these cases is that none exist, except United States v. Caraway."

Rankin's sanctions came in dollars and in status. The associate drew $3,000 and lost his pro hac vice admission in the Wyoming court. The partner drew $1,000. Goody drew $1,000. The total was $5,000. The dollars were small. The pro hac vice revocation was not. The fabricated citations included Wyoming v. U.S. Department of Energy, 2006 WL 3801910 (D. Wyo. 2006), Holland v. Keller, 2018 WL 2446162 (D. Wyo. 2018), Meyer v. City of Cheyenne, 2017 WL 3461055 (D. Wyo. 2017), and Woods v. BNSF Railway Co., 2016 WL 165971 (D. Wyo. 2016). None of those cases exist. MX2.law had written them and Morgan & Morgan had filed them.

Sixteen months later, Salinger read that Wyoming order before he ruled on the Boston motion. The partner had disclosed the sanction in his Massachusetts papers. Disclosure is required. Disclosure is not enough. Salinger wanted to see remedial measures. He wanted a record of what the firm had done. He found a sentence from a Morgan & Morgan spokesperson saying the firm had "instituted additional safeguards within the firm regarding use of AI." He found nothing else. He wrote the operative paragraph in one breath. "Since attorney Morgan's failure to comply with basic ethical requirements in the Wyoming litigation is so recent, and Morgan has made no showing that he has learned from his mistakes in that case, the court is not convinced that Morgan should be granted the privilege of appearing pro hac vice in the Massachusetts Superior Court."

That paragraph is now a portable disqualifier. A pro hac vice motion the partner files in another state court arrives on a judge's desk with the Wadsworth sanction attached. The Wyoming order sits on PACER. The Boston denial sits in the ABA Journal record. Opposing counsel can substantially incorporate both orders into opposition papers.

The Harvard morgue case is the part Wilder counsel cares about. The civil action runs against Harvard Corporation and its medical school. Former morgue manager Cedric Lodge pleaded guilty in May 2025 to federal charges in the Middle District of Pennsylvania and is serving 96 months. The criminal track against Lodge and a network of alleged buyers runs in parallel. The civil plaintiffs are families whose deceased relatives' organs and limbs were allegedly sold for cash. The case is the kind of case Morgan & Morgan was built to lead. The partner had moved to lead Wilder. He is now not in it.

What the order does to the rest of the plaintiffs' bar is the second question. Morgan & Morgan is one of the few law firms whose internally branded artificial-intelligence platform has surfaced by name in a public sanctions order. MX2.law is a firm-built tool. No other major plaintiffs' firm of which we are aware has publicly disclosed a branded proprietary large-language-model platform of comparable scope. Some firms use Lexis+ with Protégé (formerly Lexis+ AI), some use Westlaw Precision, some use Harvey or CoCounsel. Those are vendor products. MX2.law is a Morgan & Morgan product. The name appears in the Wyoming sanction order, in the Bloomberg Law coverage, in the Boston denial. A firm that builds and brands its own AI owns the output of that AI in every filing.

That is the part that travels beyond Wilder. The named-adversary plaintiffs' shops the carrier bar tracks most closely, the firms that show up across the carrier RICO scoreboard and the venue-concentration data, are likely to track the Boston denial. They will compare it to their own AI workflows. The firms running vendor tools can point to the vendor. The firms running proprietary tools cannot. Morgan & Morgan cannot.

Rankin wrote the original sentence. Salinger applied it across the country. The partner sits out. The morgue case goes on. The platform that wrote the cases remains in use inside the firm.

Wes Todd · Founder · CaseGlide