#stuart-law

#stuart-law

Instead of addressing our concerns, our legitimate concerns instead, they turn toward investigating me. And I was instrumental in leading the group. So I think that clearly they were trying to chill [the] activity of workers and that should scare every worker across the country.

Judge Stark's majority treated the challenged testimony as a permissible application of the court's claim construction and treated the survey expert's methodological problems as questions of weight for the jury.

"As a longtime leader in this space, we believe we have a responsibility to help prepare the next generation of lawyers to keep pace with where the legal industry is today and where it's headed," said Phil Saunders, the CEO of Relativity, in a press release Tuesday.

Asia Carrera, whose real name is Jessica Steinhauser, graduated from St. Mary's Law in 2024 and cleared the Texas bar exam after a previous near miss by just two points.

Lucie Allen will become a co-CEO of Barbri, a leading bar exam prep company, and will share leadership duties with Steve Fredette, the current CEO and chairman.

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.

A year or so ago, most legal departments were still testing. AI pilots. Workflow trials. Small process experiments. Everyone was learning cautiously. The stakes were relatively low, and the work was labeled "innovation," which made imperfection forgivable. Then something shifted. Those same pilots became part of day-to-day delivery, and the business started relying on them. Sometimes intentionally, because early results looked good.

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.

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.