Insights

San Francisco – July 17, 2025: Crowell & Moring has added two experienced in-house counsel from Amazon to its Litigation Group, expanding the firm’s abilities to serve clients facing complex consumer product liability issues. Clay Marquez, former Senior Corporate Counsel for WW Stores at Amazon, and Meghan McMeel, former Senior Corporate Counsel for Devices at Amazon, join the firm as partners in San Francisco.

An Alabama mother filed suit on April 8, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Roblox and Fortnite developer Epic Games, alleging that they design their platforms and games to be addictive through random reward tactics, especially targeting minors. The case is Turner et al. v. Epic Games Inc. et al., Case No. 3:26-cv-02975.

In about a year’s time, all worker noncompetition and nonacceptance of business provisions in Washington state will become void and unenforceable unless they qualify for one of the limited exceptions to the ban, thanks to a new law signed by Washington’s Governor Bob Ferguson on March 23, 2026. The new law takes effect June 30, 2027.

On February 12, 2026, a bipartisan group of legislators in Maryland proposed the Maryland Artificial Intelligence Toy Safety Act. This proposed legislation would amend the Maryland Consumer Protection Act to establish a sweeping regulatory framework for AI-enabled toys sold in the state, covering any device that uses machine learning, conversational AI, behavioral modeling, or similar computational processes and is marketed to or primarily used by children. This proposed legislation adds to a growing trend of increasing efforts, at both the federal and state levels, to regulate the use of AI in products and services used by children.