Reddit asks court to keep its former law firm Proskauer from defending Perplexity in the data-scraping case
Partly confirmed
The takeaway
In filings of Oct 9, 2026 in federal court in Manhattan, Reddit and the law firm Proskauer Rose disputed whether Proskauer may take over Perplexity’s defence in Reddit’s scraping lawsuit.
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 13 October 2026
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Key facts
- Underlying case: Reddit sued Perplexity and the data-collection companies SerpApi, Oxylabs and AWMProxy on Oct 22, 2025 in the Southern District of New York, alleging they got around technical protections to take Reddit content, in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
- July 31, 2026: Judge Paul A. Engelmayer let most of the claims proceed; per Law360 he cut one DMCA claim against SerpApi and the state-law unjust-enrichment and unfair-competition claims (search summary, not read directly)
- Reddit’s objection (Law Commentary, on the Oct 9 filings): Proskauer represented Reddit in a whistleblower suit by former employee Jutta Williams that involved Reddit’s licensing deals with Google and OpenAI; Reddit refused consent when Proskauer sought to represent Perplexity, the firm withdrew from the whistleblower case in November 2025, and Reddit says it was assured Proskauer would stay out of the Perplexity litigation. Reddit invokes the ‘hot potato’ doctrine against dropping a client to take on its opponent
- Proskauer’s reply: the whistleblower case was an employment dispute unrelated to scraping, no binding restriction exists, and the lawyers on the Perplexity matter are screened from Reddit’s confidential information
- Perplexity says it wants Proskauer for its experience defending companies accused of automated scraping, including SerpApi against Google
- Status: no ruling yet; Perplexity’s current counsel, Keker, Van Nest & Peters, has asked to withdraw, and the judge deferred that request until the Proskauer question is decided
What happened
Reddit’s lawsuit accuses Perplexity of buying Reddit content that scraping companies collected through Google search results. After the court let most of the case go forward in July 2026, Perplexity moved to replace its lawyers with Proskauer Rose. Reddit objected on Oct 9: Proskauer had been Reddit’s own counsel in a case that touched its AI licensing agreements. The judge has to decide whether that earlier work is close enough to the scraping case to bar the firm.
Reuters reported the dispute on Oct 12, but we could not read that article; the details here come from Law Commentary’s account of the same filings, so confidence is medium.
Why it matters
The dispute itself is procedural. The entry mainly records the state of Reddit v. Perplexity, one of the main US cases on scraping for AI answer engines, which was not in the dataset: it survived dismissal in July 2026 and is moving toward discovery.
Sources
4 sources from 4 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
4 sources: 4 press
Press
- Reuters: Reddit and Perplexity AI clash over law firm’s role in data-scraping case (Oct 12; not readable by our fetcher)reuters.com, press
- Law Commentary: Reddit accuses former law firm of switching sides to defend Perplexity AIlawcommentary.com, press
- Law360: Reddit AI data scraping case mostly survives dismissal (July 31; not read directly)law360.com, press
- Axios: Reddit sues Perplexity and data scraping firms (Oct 22, 2025)axios.com, press
Changes
- Filed