Jones Walker

Only a few days ago, we wrote about OpenAI's sandbox escape into Hugging Face and warned that the real lesson wasn't about one vendor's mistake. This week, Anthropic proved the point for us — three times over.

A few years back, I sent a longtime client a budget. At the bottom, under the real line items, I added one more: "Spanish Inquisition — $10,000." He wrote back a single line: "Approved — but are we expecting the Spanish Inquisition?" It's one of the most satisfying email exchanges of my career. The joke only works if you know the Monty Python line it's built on — "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" — the whole premise being that it arrives as a total surprise.

When you win a bid, everything can feel like it is going your way — until defective plans, slow RFI responses, or other owner interference upend the work and costs pile up. The sense that you got burned is real, but it is not enough. Courts require that feeling to become something the law recognizes as damages. Contract damages put the non-breaching party in the position it would have occupied had the contract been performed.

Jones Walker LLPis pleased to welcome Emma Moppert as special counsel in the Litigation Practice Group and member of the environmental litigation team in the firm’s New Orleans office. “We are pleased to welcome Emma to Jones Walker,” said Bill Hines, the firm’s managing partner.

In early 2024, a finance employee in the Hong Kong office of engineering firm Arup joined a video conference that appeared to include the company's chief financial officer and several colleagues. After receiving instructions during the call, the employee authorized multiple transfers totaling roughly $25 million. The other apparent participants were synthetic representations. Seeing is no longer believing.

Jones Walker is pleased to announce that the firm and three attorneys have been ranked in the 2026 Chambers High Net Worth Guide. The firm was recognized in Band 1 as a leading firm in Louisiana for Private Wealth Law. Additionally, three Tax Practice Group partners and members of the estate planning and administration team were recognized individually: David F. Edwards was honored with a Senior Statespeople designation, Miriam Wogan Henry was recognized in Band 1, and Rose S.

A serious workplace incident rarely ends with the incident itself. For many employers, the next challenge arrives when OSHA begins asking questions. The steps taken during the first 24 hours often shape the course of the agency's investigation and can affect the company's position in any resulting enforcement action or litigation.

Act 255 changed Louisiana’s public prompt-payment rules, and on public projects it changes the balance of leverage in a real way. It took effect May 15, 2026. The core change: A public owner can no longer hold back liquidated damages the contractor disputes. If the owner believes it is owed delay damages, it has to pay the contractor first and pursue the claim in a separate lawsuit.

By Andrew R. Lee, Graham H. Ryan, Michelle Ramsden, Jason M. Loring AI systems no longer just answer questions. They book travel, move money, negotiate terms, and take actions in the world with less human supervision at each step. When one of those actions causes harm, an obvious responsibility question follows: can the developer, deployer, or user point to the system's autonomy and say the machine acted on its own?

Until recently, Louisiana's Prompt Payment Statute (La. R.S. 9:2784) pointed in one direction. It told contractors how fast to push money downstream and punished them when they did not. It never meaningfully told the owner when to pay in the first place. Louisiana Act 822 closes that gap effective August 1, 2026, and it does so with teeth. Owners have a deadline now.