Tech News

Exclusive: Superlawyer David Boies expected to hit Boeing with wrongful death suit spurred by suicide of whistleblower John Barnett

Published

4 hours ago

March 18, 2025

John

Attorney David Boies and the legal team that have long championed the case of the late Boeing whistleblower John Barnett, are expected to file a “wrongful death suit” against the troubled aerospace colossus, Fortune has learned. A little over a year ago, after giving two days of testimony in a long-running action versus Boeing, Barnett was found dead after spending the entire night in his Clemson orange, Dodge Ram truck, his finger on the trigger of a sliver Smith and Weston pistol, and a note sitting next to his body. In May, an investigation by the Charleston Police Department found that Barnett had committed suicide by putting by putting a bullet through his head. (You can read the full story of Barnett’s life and tragic death in our feature here.)

Fortune is the first to report the news of the expected suit and Boies’ involvement. When asked for comment, Boeing provided the following statement to Fortune: “We are saddened by John Barnett’s death and extend our condolences to his family.”

Barnett’s passing didn’t end his crusade to make Boeing expose blatant violations of its own policies and procedures that he claims to have experienced in his seven years at the 787 Dreamliner factory in North Charleston, South Carolina. Starting in 2017, just before Barnett left Boeing due to the onset of PTSD and panic and anxiety attacks, Charleston attorneys Rob Turkewitz and Brian Knowles sued Boeing on a so-called Air21 complaint under an Office of Health and Safety Administration law that protects whistleblowers from retaliation by their employers. But the wrongful death suit versus Boeing is a new action that’s being introduced in addition to the OSHA or regulatory suit. The team will strive to prove “causation” showing that Boeing’s specific actions caused the workplace stress that led him to suicide. And the Trukewitz-Knowles duo added big time firepower by engaging Boies, Schiller et al. to join the campaign, and especially in getting the 84-year old founder who’d won a landmark antitrust case for the US Justice Department against Microsoft, represented the Al Gore campaign in the 2000 Florida presidential recount and garnered big settlements for the Jeffrey Epstein victims to take a leading role in both cases. (Boies, it should also be noted stirred controversy for his representation of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, who’s serving time for sexual offenses, and Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos.)

The OSHA and new wrongful death suit each seeks financial damages on behalf of Barnett’s estate, including Vicky Stokes and his brothers Rodney, Michael and Robbie Barnett. “When we got the police and autopsy reports concluding that John had taken his own life, Brian and I issued a press release expressing our sadness and stating that ‘while Boeing may not have pulled the trigger, the company is legally responsible for his death,'” Turkewitz told Fortune. Boeing greatly hardened its stance, he says, after it became clear that the Barnett lawyers were also seeking to file a wrongful death case.

Up against what he characterizes as a small army of Boeing lawyers, Turkewitz and Knowles decided they needed to engage powerful reinforcements. So Turkewitz turned to his old friend Boies. The two had collaborated in the late 1990s, securing a big verdict in an asbestos liability case in New York City. “David’s one of the best lawyers in America,” said Turkewitz. “He got to know the Barnett family. He took the case not because the dollars are huge but because of the message we’d be sending.” Boies is working closely on the cases with Boies, Schiller et al. managing partner Sigrid McCawley.

Boies blasts “the old Boeing arrogance”

When this writer interviewed Boies in mid March at his rambling country home set in horse country north of Manhattan in Amonk, New York, the litigator was in full reformer mode. Boies, who’d turned 84 the previous week, insisted that Barnett was a hero who embodied just the kind of dedication to diligently following safety rules that Boeing now needs to restore its reputation. Attired in a vintage blue suit over red-and-green plaid work shirt and Sketchers shoes, Boies told me, “He wasn’t looking for anything for himself. He was just looking to make airplanes safe. And they immediately wanted to bury him because they considered any kind of criticism a threat. If they’d listened to people like Barnett all along, they wouldn’t have had the problems that injured them so badly.”

Boies says that in the litigation, Boeing adopted a “scorched earth policy” that “you see from time to time, but thankfully not often.” He professes amazement that leadership isn’t settling the Barnett case as part of an initiative symbolizing that Boeing’s shedding its recently troubled past to find a new direction. “They should be celebrating Barnett instead of continuing to try to ignore his example of doing the right thing,” he allows. For Boies, the new management keeps using the right words, but contradicting its position by not admitting openly to its past mistakes. “They purport to want to close the door to the past. But every time you bring up the kind of specific abuses Barnett identified, they deny them. The old Boeing arrogance and refusal to accept criticism comes back,” declares Boies.

Says Turkewitz, “John’s death has been devastating for his family and friends. John’s mom Vicky and his brothers are amazing people and want to continue John’s mission to protect the flying public. We had hoped to resolve the cases at mediation, but unfortunately reached an impasse.”

Boies expects the wrongful death case to go to trial

As for the cases, Boies recounts that the two sides have discussed a deal that would settle both actions in a single package. “But I don’t think we ever got into a narrow enough range,” he says. “It was clear they were not willing to be reasonable in terms of numbers. They want to treat this like they’re an insurance company that doesn’t want to pay out any money.” He believes that in the OSHA case, the administrative judge will award the Barnetts a settlement if the two sides don’t reach an agreement beforehand. “Boeing will mainly argue about the amount to be paid,” he says. In the wrongful death action, he adds, the outcome will hinge on whether Boeing’s alleged harassment of Barnett on the job that he claims brought on post dramatic stress syndrome and anxiety and panic attacks was legally responsible for his demise, when he took his own life. “It will be the argument ‘We didn’t pull the trigger, we didn’t push him off a ledge,'” says Boies. “But I think we know a lot about PTSD today and the effects it can have in destroying a person’s life.”

Boies believes the wrongful death case will go to trial, and Turkewitz agrees. The Charleston attorney predicts that Boeing will fight hard to prevent it from getting before a jury. “Boeing’s lawyers will argue that it’s frivolous, they’ll file motions and seek summary judgment to block it,” he says. Both Turkewitz and Boies believe that Barnett’s ultimate vindication may be from the judgment of twelve Americans assessing whether Boeing caused the death of this passionate maverick by punishing him for a crusade that, had leadership joined in, could have saved a great American institution from its steep fall from grace.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Tech News

How news organizations should overhaul their operations as the gen AI threatens their livelihoods

Published

2 hours ago

March 18, 2025

John

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…The news media grapples with AI; Trump orders U.S. AI Safety efforts to refocus on combating ‘ideological bias’; distributed training is gaining increasing traction; increasingly powerful AI could tip the scales toward totalitarianism.

AI is potentially disruptive to many organizations’ business models. In few sectors, however, is the threat as seemingly existential as the news business. That happens to be the business I’m in, so I hope you will forgive a somewhat self-indulgent newsletter. But news ought to matter to all of us since a functioning free press performs an essential role in democracy—informing the public and helping to hold power to account. And, there are some similarities between how news executives are—and critically, are not—addressing the challenges and opportunities AI presents that business leaders in other sectors can learn from, too.

Last week, I spent a day at an Aspen Institute conference entitled “AI & News: Charting the Course,” that was hosted at Reuters’ headquarters in London. The conference was attended by top executives from a number of U.K. and European news organizations. It was held under Chatham House Rules so I can’t tell you who exactly said what, but I can relay what was said.

Tools for journalists and editors

News executives spoke about using AI primarily in internally-facing products to make their teams more efficient. AI is helping write search engine-optimized headlines and translate content—potentially letting organizations reach new audiences in places they haven’t traditionally served, though most emphasized keeping humans in the loop to monitor accuracy.

One editor described using AI to automatically produce short articles from press releases, freeing journalists for more original reporting, while maintaining human editors for quality control. Journalists are also using AI to summarize documents and analyze large datasets—like government document dumps and satellite imagery—enabling investigative journalism that would be difficult without these tools. These are good use cases, but they result in modest impact—mostly around making existing workflows more efficient.

Bottom-up or top-down?

There was active debate among the newsroom leaders and techies present about whether news organizations should take a bottom-up approach—putting generative AI tools in the hands of every journalist and editor, allowing these folks to run their own data analysis or “vibe code” AI-powered widgets to help them in their jobs, or whether efforts should be top-down, with the management prioritizing projects.

The bottom-up approach has merits—it democratizes access to AI, empowers frontline employees who often know the pain points and can often spot good use cases before high-level execs can, and frees limited AI developer talent to be spent only on projects that are bigger, more complex, and potentially more strategically important.

The downside of the bottom-up approach is that it can be chaotic, making it hard for the organization to ensure compliance with ethical and legal policies. It can create technical debt, with tools being built on the fly that can’t be easily maintained or updated. One editor worried about creating a two-tiered newsroom, with some editors embracing the new tech, and others falling behind. Bottom-up also doesn’t ensure that solutions generate the best return on investment—a key consideration as AI models can quickly get expensive. Many called for a balanced approach, though there was no consensus on how to achieve it. From conversations I’ve had with execs in other sectors, this dilemma is familiar across industries.

Caution about jeopardizing trust

News outfits are also being cautious about building audience-facing AI tools. Many have begun using AI to produce bullet-point summaries of articles that can help busy and increasingly impatient readers. Some have built AI chatbots that can answer questions about a particular, narrow subset of their coverage—like stories about the Olympics or climate change—but they have tended to label these as “experiments” in order to help flag to readers that the answers may not always be accurate. Few have gone further in terms of AI-generated content. They worry that gen AI-produced hallucinations will undercut trust in the accuracy of their journalism. Their brands and their businesses ultimately depend on that trust.

Those who hesitate will be lost?

This caution, while understandable, is itself a colossal risk. If news organizations themselves aren’t using AI to summarize the news and make it more interactive, technology companies are. People are increasingly turning to AI search engines and chatbots, including Perplexity, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini and the “AI Overviews” Google now provides in response to many searches, and many others. Several news executives at the conference said “disintermediation”—the loss of a direct connection with their audience—was their biggest fear.

They have cause to be worried. Many news organizations (including Fortune) are at least partly dependent on Google search to bring in audiences. A recent study by Tollbit—which sells software that helps protect websites from web crawlers—found that clickthrough rates for Google AI Overviews were 91% lower than from a traditional Google Search. (Google has not yet used AI overviews for news queries, although many think it is only a matter of time.) Other studies of click through rates from chatbot conversations are equally abysmal. Cloudflare, which is also offering to help protect news publishers from web scraping, found that OpenAI scraped a news site 250 times for every one referral page view it sent that site.

So far, news organizations have responded to this potentially existential threat through a mix of legal pushback—the New York Times has sued OpenAI for copyright violations, while Dow Jones and the New York Post have sued Perplexity—and partnerships. Those partnerships have involved multiyear, seven-figure licensing deals for news content. (Fortune has a partnership with both Perplexity and ProRata.) Many of the execs at the conference said the licensing deals were a way to make revenue from content the tech companies had most likely already “stolen” anyway. They also saw the partnerships as a way to build relationships with the tech companies and tap their expertise to help them build AI products or train their staffs. None saw the relationships as particularly stable. They were all aware of the risk of becoming overly reliant on AI licensing revenue, having been burned previously when the media industry let Facebook become a major driver of traffic and ad revenue. Later, that money vanished practically overnight when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided, after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, to de-emphasize news in people’s feeds.

An AI-powered Ferrari yoked to a horse cart

Executives acknowledged needing to build direct audience relationships that can’t be disintermediated by AI companies, but few had clear strategies for doing so. One expert at the conference said bluntly that “the news industry is not taking AI seriously,” focusing on “incremental adaptation rather than structural transformation.” He likened current approaches to a three-step process that had “an AI-powered Ferrari” at both ends, but “a horse and cart in the middle.”

He and another media industry advisor urged news organizations to get away from organizing their approach to news around “articles,” and instead think about ways in which source material (public data, interview transcripts, documents obtained from sources, raw video footage, audio recordings, and archival news stories) could be turned into a variety of outputs—podcasts, short form video, bullet-point summaries, or yes, a traditional news article—to suit audience tastes on the fly by generative AI technology. They also urged news organizations to stop thinking of the production of news as a linear process, and begin thinking about it more as a circular loop, perhaps one in which there was no human in the middle.

One person at the conference said that news organizations needed to become less insular and look more closely at insights and lessons from other industries and how they were adapting to AI. Others said that it might require startups—perhaps incubated by the news organizations themselves—to pioneer new business models for the AI age.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. While AI poses existential challenges to traditional journalism, it also offers unprecedented opportunities to expand reach and potentially reconnect with audiences who have “turned off news”—if leaders are bold enough to reimagine what news can be in the AI era.

With that, here’s more AI news.

Jeremy Kahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
@jeremyakahn

Correction: Last week’s Tuesday edition of Eye on AI misidentified the country where Trustpilot is headquartered. It is Denmark. Also, a news item in that edition misidentified the name of the Chinese startup behind the viral AI model Manus. The name of the startup is Butterfly Effect.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Tech News

How to watch the First Four of the 2025 NCAA Tournament for free—and without cable

Published

2 hours ago

March 18, 2025

John

The First Four games of the NCAA Tournament are being held Tuesday and Wednesday, March 18 and 19. They’re an appetizer, of sorts, for the first round of March Madness, one of the most anticipated basketball tournaments of the year.

Selection Sunday is behind us. Now it’s time for March Madness to get underway. (Sorry, HR directors!)

The NCAA Tournament is one of the highlights of spring and while the Round of 64 will get underway later this week, fans will get an appetizer starting tonight with the First Four games.

This matchup sees the four lowest-seeded automatic qualifiers and the four lowest-seeded at-large teams face off in an attempt to make it to the official tournament. It’s where Cinderella stories are born and where longshot bets can pay off (though rarely do).

Here’s a look at who’s playing in the First Four—and some options to watch them.

What is the schedule for the NCAA Tournament’s First Four games?

Here’s who’s playing in the First Four.

Tuesday, March 19

St. Francis vs. Alabama State, 6:40 p.m. ET on TruTV

UNC vs. San Diego State, 9:10 p.m. ET on TruTV

Wednesday, March 20

Mt. St. Mary’s vs. American, 6:40 p.m. ET on TruTV

Xavier vs. Texas, 9:10 p.m. ET on TruTV

How can I watch the First Four games for free?

Ok, here’s the bad news. None of the First Four games will be broadcast over the air, meaning you’ll need either a cable subscription or a streaming service to watch. Many streaming services have done away with free trials, but a few remain. See below for details.

Can I watch the 2025 First Four games online?

Yep! Here are a few other options.

Max

The one-time HBO Max doesn’t have a free trial, unfortunately. Subscriptions start at $9.99 per month.

Disney+

Disney’s bundle of Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ no longer has a free trial, so you’ll have to pay $17 per month for all three combined (or $30 per month for no ads on Hulu).

Including Live TV in the bundle bumps the price to $77 per month ($90 with no ads).

Hulu with Live TV

The free trial on this service lasts three days. Afterward, it will cost you $77 per month.

YouTubeTV

After a free trial, you can expect monthly charges of $73.

Sling TV

Dish Network’s Sling lower-tiered “Orange” plan will run you $40 per month. Adding the more comprehensive “Blue” plan bumps the cost to $55 per month. The seven-day free trial has disappeared, unfortunately.

DirecTV Stream

Formerly known as DirecTV Now, AT&T TVNow and AT&T TV, this oft-renamed streaming service will run you $80 per month and up after the free trial option.

Fubo TV

This sports-focused cord-cutting service carries broadcast networks in most markets. There’s a seven-day free trial, followed by monthly charges of $80 and up, depending on the channels you choose.

Can I watch any March Madness games on Amazon Prime Video?

No. March Madness do not stream on Amazon, unless you purchase a subscription to a streaming service.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Tech News

Cathie Wood says most memecoins will end up ‘worthless’

Published

3 hours ago

March 18, 2025

John

Most of the so-called memecoins that are flooding the $2.6 trillion cryptocurrency space will probably end up “worthless,” according to Cathie Wood.

The combination of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence is creating “millions” of meme cryptocurrencies that “are not going to be worth very much,” the ARK Investment Managment LLC founder and CEO told Bloomberg Television on Tuesday, adding that her private funds are not putting money into these coins.

Memecoins are a type of digital asset often inspired by jokes, current events or trends in popular culture. In February, the US Securities and Exchange Commission said memecoins are not considered securities so they will remain unregulated.

“If I have one message for those listening who are buying memecoins: buyer beware,” said Wood. “There’s nothing like losing money for people to learn, and they’ll learn that the SEC and regulators are not taking responsibility for these memecoins.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com