"The Klekamp family's extraordinary generosity honors Donald Klekamp's legacy while strengthening our ability to prepare the next generation of talented legal minds," said University of Cincinnati President Neville G. Pinto, in the university's news release.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
It's not only law firms and legal departments that are adopting GenAI systems without fully understanding what they can and cannot do - court systems may also be tempted to adopt these tools to short circuit workloads in the face of limited resources. And that poses some risks and concerns to the rule of law, a notion that hinges on accuracy, fairness, and public perception.