Law
fromAbove the Law
14 hours agoMorning Docket: 04.07.26 - Above the Law
The new US News law school rankings have been released and are notably controversial.
The legal profession rewards endurance, precision and control. It also quietly normalizes stress, isolation and overextension. For patent practitioners and other IP lawyers, the pressures are uniquely acute: compressed prosecution deadlines, high-stakes litigation exposure, often unrealistic client-driven budget constraints, regulatory whiplash at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and increasingly complex technologies layered with global filing and prosecution strategy.
I'm incredibly proud of the firm and what we've accomplished in the last year. We had certainly, the year before, a historic year financially, and this year was also historic in being one of our best financial years in history.
Leading legal departments are shifting from reactive negotiation to proactive pricing design, setting guardrails before rates are proposed rather than responding after the fact. This approach enables departments to establish parameters and expectations upfront, fundamentally changing the negotiation dynamic and improving outcomes.
From law firms to in-house legal teams, the rules of value are being rewritten. The question is: Who's ready to lead the change? In the first episode of 2026 for the UpLevel View podcast, Stephanie Corey and Ken Callander sit down with Rita Gunther McGrath, Columbia Business School professor and Wall Street Journal columnist, to talk about how AI is forcing professional services to price outcomes instead of hours.
You're getting ready to make a document production to the other side. You're worried though that the other side may use GenAI tools on the documents that don't ensure they are protected from public disclosure. You ask to see the other side's policies just to be sure. They refuse. You ask the judge for a protective order since some of your documents contain trade secrets.
They don't drive it. They don't manage it. They don't control it. They let it control them. And then one day, they look up and realize discovery closed last week, the client is asking why nobody has taken the key depo, the adjuster wants a status report "by the end of the day," and the partner is asking the question that makes your stomach drop: "Where are we on this file?"
The Thomson Reuters Institute and Georgetown Law's Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession released their annual State of the U.S. Legal Market report today, and the good news is that law firms are absolutely crushing it. Profits are up. Rates are up. Demand surged in 2025 at levels the industry hasn't seen in more than a decade. The Am Law 100 is printing money, midsize firms are having a moment, and everyone is congratulating themselves for their "resilience."