Photo of Stephen C. Piepgrass

Stephen leads the firm’s Regulatory Investigations, Strategy + Enforcement (RISE) Practice Group. He focuses his practice on enforcement actions, investigations, and litigation. Stephen primarily represents clients engaging with, or being investigated by, state attorneys general and other state or local governmental enforcement bodies, including the CFPB and FTC, as well as clients involved with litigation, with a particular focus on heavily regulated industries. He also has experience advising clients on data and privacy issues, including handling complex investigations into data incidents by state attorneys general other state and federal regulators. Additionally, Stephen provides strategic counsel to Troutman Pepper’s Strategies clients who need assistance with public policy, advocacy, and government relations strategies.

Financial services companies are using AI to assist with many business processes, including underwriting decisions, consumer credit approval, servicing and collections, loss mitigation programs, customer interaction on websites and mobile apps via chatbots, and in detecting fraud. In this fourth episode, Stephen Piepgrass and colleagues Chris Willis and Michael Yaghi examine the use and impact of AI in the financial services industry. They discuss the potential risks financial services companies may face with increased reliance on AI, as well as the increased focus on AI by various regulators and state attorneys general.

AI continues to capture the headlines. One recent headline noted that ChatGPT passed the medical boards. In this third episode, Stephen Piepgrass and colleagues Michael Yaghi and Barry Boise discuss the potential risks health care companies may face with increased reliance on AI, as well as the increased focus on AI by various regulators and state attorneys general, particularly in the health care space.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has captured the imagination and generated excitement with consumers and businesses, but at the same time, developments in AI have also raised public concerns and spawned regulation that sometimes threatens to outpace the technological innovation we are seeing. In this second in our series on AI, Stephen Piepgrass and colleagues Jim Koenig and Chris Willis discuss the background of AI, including the opportunities and associated risks it presents, as well as the emerging global best practices surrounding the collection, use, and sharing of data and its use in AI.

Join us for the first in a series of episodes covering artificial intelligence (AI). As technology continues to develop, more companies are using AI in their day-to-day business, and with increased use comes increased risk. In this episode, Stephen Piepgrass and colleagues Michael Yaghi and Trey Smith provide an overview of AI, including uses and risks, and the increased focus on AI by various regulators, including state attorneys general, federal agencies, and local governments.

The U.S. tobacco industry is subject to a variety of regulators at the federal and state level. In this first of a two-part series focused on significant regulatory developments in the tobacco industry, Stephen Piepgrass is joined by colleagues Bryan Haynes, Agustin Rodriguez and Nick Ramos to review what happened over the past year, and offer thoughts on what to expect in the months ahead.

In a January 10 ruling, U.S. District Judge Mary Geiger Lewis sided with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), finding that they may continue in their fight to show that the South Carolina state court system’s restriction on automated “scraping” of eviction-related case information violates their First Amendment right to access and record public court records. “Scraping,” an automated data collection technique, is currently prohibited by the terms of use of the state Public Index, and attorneys who violate these terms can face disciplinary action. South Carolina Court Administration also uses technical means to prevent scraping. The NAACP has argued there is no reason for the outright ban, and other court systems allow the practice without any adverse consequences.

Published in Law360 on January 25, 2023. © Copyright 2023, Portfolio Media, Inc., publisher of Law360. Reprinted here with permission.

In recent months, there has been an explosion of artificial intelligence tools that have given even technophobes an opportunity to test AI’s power from the comfort of their favorite web browser.

From DALL-E’s ability to generate digital images from natural language prompts to ChatGPT’s ability to answer questions, write blog posts, essays, poetry or even song lyrics, today’s AI tools can be used by anyone who can open a web browser.