Judge revokes Boies Schiller's appointment as interim class counsel in authors' suit against Meta

What happened

On 2 November 2026, Judge Vince Chhabria of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California revoked Boies Schiller Flexner LLP's appointment as interim class counsel in Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 3:23-cv-03417, the 2023 class action in which book authors accuse Meta of infringing their copyrighted works to train its Llama AI models. Bloomberg Law reported the revocation on 3 November 2026, citing a Monday minute entry in which the court said it will revisit the appointment of interim class counsel.

Context

The revocation follows the judge's repeated criticism of plaintiffs' counsel. Judge Chhabria had previously scolded the firm over the delayed addition of a contributory-infringement claim, and later allowed the plaintiffs to amend their complaint to add that claim while again criticizing counsel for not having included it in an earlier version. The claim concerns the allegation that Meta pirated the plaintiffs' works from a platform that creates a copy of a work every time it is torrented.

What this does and does not change

This is a change of lawyers, not a ruling on the merits: the underlying copyright claims against Meta continue, and the court has not yet named replacement interim class counsel. It also does not disturb the court's June 2025 summary-judgment ruling that training Llama on the plaintiffs' books was fair use on the record then before it; the remaining open issues in the case concern Meta's alleged torrenting of pirated books, including the Books3 dataset. All infringement allegations remain allegations, not findings, except where a court has already ruled.