Henry M. Sneath, Director at Houston Harbaugh, P.C., received DRI’s G. Duffield Smith Outstanding Publication Award. He is being honored for his co-authored January 2026 For The Defense article, “Defending the Algorithm®: A Bayesian Analysis of AI Litigation and Law” along with Christopher M. Jacobs. The award was presented on Friday, October 23, at the 2026 DRI Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.
Henry is Co-Chair of Houston Harbaugh’s Litigation Practice and Chair of its Intellectual Property and AI Practice. He served as President of DRI in 2011–2012, and he created and writes the Defending the Algorithm® blog, podcast, and LinkedIn newsletter. The Best Lawyers in America® named him its 2026 Pittsburgh Lawyer of the Year for Litigation – Patent.
The G. Duffield Smith Award recognizes the most outstanding defense-related writing published by DRI. The award is part of DRI’s Annual Professional Achievement and Service Awards. These awards honor outstanding performance by state, local, and national defense organizations, DRI law firms, and individual members. Honorees are recognized for their contributions to the defense bar and the civil justice system, or for community and public service that has a positive impact on society.
The award-winning article applies Bayes’ theorem of conditional probability to the fast-developing field of AI litigation and offers a framework for defending AI-related claims. The authors, Sneath and Jacobs, analyzed emerging case law on AI training, copyright, trade secrets, Terms of Service violations, and related liability theories, and use Bayesian concepts to assess litigation risk and forecast where the law is heading. Published by the DRI Center for Law and Public Policy AI Task Force, the article is Part One of the authors’ two-part Defending the Algorithm® series. Part Two, “The AI Daily Routine: An Artificial Intelligence Practicum for Defense Attorneys,” was the cover story of the February 2026 issue.