"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.
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.
Here's the good news: writing isn't a talent. It's a skill. And skills respond to the same cure as every other skill: reps. Not glamorous reps. Not the kind that gets applause. The kind you do in small rooms, when no one is watching, when you're a little uncomfortable, when you want to quit halfway through because the sentence you just wrote feels like wet cardboard. That's the work.
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?"
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.
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.
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.