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.
As part of the newly created Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS) survey, colleges must submit years of disaggregated admissions data-including the test scores, grade point averages, race, sex and income ranges of applied, admitted and enrolled students dating as far back as 2019. The data collection is part of an effort to verify that universities aren't considering race in admissions decisions after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the use of such practices in 2023.
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.
Our partnership is proud to have stood firm on behalf of its clients. The DOJ's decision to withdraw its appeals makes permanent the rulings of four federal judges that the executive orders targeting law firms were unconstitutional.
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?"