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.
Effective discovery requires more than compliance - it requires strategy. Litigators can balance expansive discovery rights and privacy concerns without slowing cases down through practical, results-focused approaches that consider proportionality, electronically stored information management, and the specific discovery rules applicable to their jurisdiction.
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.
AI will replace some tasks, reshape many roles, and change how legal services get delivered, but it is far less likely to replace the full lawyer function where judgment, strategy, persuasion, and accountability still drive value.
This script is based on a theory proposed by Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale Law School. Ackerman's idea is laid out in his 1991 book We The People: Foundations, and is discussed in the second of his Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures of 2006. It's gained prominence since the 2024 election and the wholesale assault on our governmental system by Trump.
Lindsey Halligan has finally done the one thing the Department of Justice steadfastly refused to do for months: acknowledge reality. Following an extended farce of legally illiterate cosplay as the "United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia," Halligan had to hang up her wings and tutu as Judge David Novak declared that playtime was over. In an 18-page benchslapping, Judge Novak formally barred Halligan from
A majority of justices say this 16-judge court likely has jurisdiction over lawsuits regarding thousands of National Institutes of Health federal research grants that the Trump administration has tried to terminate, as well as other fights concerning canceled grants. If the Supreme Court sticks by its current thinking in final rulings, the Court of Federal Claims could be handling fights over countless grants that the Trump administration and future higher ed-targeting presidencies may try to cancel in the future.
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?"
Lindsey Halligan, the former insurance attorney who spent some time "masquerading" - to use a federal judge's words - as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia attempted to ramrod criminal cases against Donald Trump's political enemies and failed spectacularly. Halligan botched the grand jury process, submitted an indictment that the full grand jury never saw, and got two cases dismissed simultaneously.
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.
