Tech and AI
A law firm says the AI it bought did not work, and the contract renewed anyway
By Staff Writer | 6 September 2026
Two claims across two courts turn on the same two questions: what the software was promised to do, and whether the notice not to renew was given in time.
DK Law, a personal injury firm based in California, alleges that the telecommunications and software supplier branded ConnexAI sold it a telephone system and artificial intelligence software that did not do what it was said to do, and then went on invoicing after being told the contract would not be renewed. The vendor rejects the allegations.
Two cases are running. The firm's claim was filed on 30 April 2026 in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, Southern Division, as DK Law Injury, Accident, and More, PC v. Connex One Ltd., number 8:26-cv-01021. The vendor got there first: it sued the firm in March 2026 in the Supreme Court of the State of New York for unpaid invoices, and that claim now sits in the Southern District of New York as Connex One, Inc. v. DK Law, number 1:26-cv-03743. The supplier is branded ConnexAI and registered as Connex One Limited in the United Kingdom and Connex One Inc in the United States.
What was said to be in the box
The California complaint alleges the vendor promises customers a telephone system and artificial intelligence software solution with functionality that does not exist or perform as represented. The specifics are worth setting out, because they are the sort of thing that goes into a schedule and is never tested until it fails. The software was said to include sentiment analysis, entity recognition, call transcripts, interaction clustering, training cues and the ability to identify trends. Voice recognition, the firm says it was told, would never miss a word. Transcription was said to work in Spanish as well as English.
What the firm says it got, on its own account, was a telephone system that frequently went down, calls dropped or unanswered, and calls consistently misrouted. Engineers were sent, and the supplier's chief technology officer travelled from the United Kingdom. The complaint says that sometimes the problem was resolved for the moment, only to recur shortly thereafter, with no permanent fix. Messaging through WhatsApp is alleged to have been unreliable to the point of being unusable. On checking recordings against transcripts, the firm says it found only a few seconds of some conversations captured despite evidence of a longer call, English transcripts inaccurate, and Spanish transcription not working at all.
The renewal
Brendan Haverlock, the firm's chief technology officer, told the vendor that the contract would not be renewed when it expired in October 2025. The New York claim says the agreement the parties entered in October 2024 renewed for a subsequent term commencing on 8 October 2025. The firm alleges that invoices kept arriving after the term ended.
There is a limit to what we can say while the matter is before the court. This claim is one part of a wider dispute which was initiated by Connex One Inc. The allegations now being made are rejected, and we would note that they were raised only after we issued proceedings which are active.
Dan Richardson, general manager for North America at ConnexAI
The court records show two further claims by the same vendor in the same New York court within a week of the DK Law filing, against Complete Senior Benefits, LLC and Focus Services, LLC.
The practical lesson, before any court decides anything
Nothing here has been proved. Both cases are live and the allegations are contested. But the shape of the dispute is already instructive for anybody buying software with artificial intelligence attached to it, and it comes down to two drafting failures that are entirely avoidable.
The first is that a list of capabilities in a proposal is not an acceptance test. Sentiment analysis and the ability to identify trends are not measurable obligations. Recognition that will never miss a word is, if somebody writes down the word error rate, the sample and who measures it. Where the promise cannot be measured, the argument later is about what was meant rather than about what was delivered.
The second is the renewal date. The firm says it gave notice; the vendor's pleaded case is that the term rolled over. That argument is not about the software at all. It is about who was watching the calendar, and it is the reason an automatic renewal clause belongs in a diary entry the day the contract is signed, with the notice window worked out backwards from the expiry and the notice given in the form the contract requires.