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Magistrate Judge M. Kendra Klump was honored at her official investiture ceremony last Friday.
Chief Judge Tanya Walton Pratt of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana presided over the Sept. 15 ceremony, according to a Wednesday news release from the court.
“Judge Klump, in the eight months since you joined our federal court family you have been a superstar,” Pratt said during the ceremony, according to the release. “I’ve heard from the lawyers who have appeared before her that she appreciates the challenges they face but demands the best from them and gives the best of herself. By example she sets high standards which encourages participants in a case to perform that much better.
“I am honored to have the privilege of formally welcoming you aboard,” Pratt continued. “On behalf of the District Court Judges, thank you for your persistence. We are confident that your presence here will be marked with honor and distinction.”
Klump fills the vacancy created by Judge Doris Pryor’s elevation to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. She was first sworn in during a private ceremony in January.
“I started as an assistant U.S. attorney in Cleveland,” Klump said during the Friday ceremony, according to the news release. “It was there that my former colleagues in the Northern District of Ohio did the hard work of introducing me to the legal profession. My mentors — both official and unofficial — showed me how to be a zealous but compassionate advocate and instilled in me that the chair in which I sat would always be more important than whoever sat in it.
“A fierce group of Cleveland women taught me how to be brave inside of the courtroom and set a sky-high bar for what it means to be a friend,” Klump continued. “And my colleagues here in the Southern District — from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the law enforcement agencies, and the defense bar — continued to develop me as an attorney and as a professional.”
The Milwaukee native is a graduate of Georgetown University, where she received a Bachelor of Science in physics and mathematics with a minor in French in 2004.
Before heading to law school, she served as a Brookhaven National Laboratory fellow with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. After that, she joined the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C., as a general scientist.
In 2008, Klump started at the University of Michigan Law School, where she was a Darrow Scholar, recipient of the Rakow Scholarship and earned certificates of merit for performance in Administrative Law and Securities Regulation. She was also a contributing editor on the Michigan Law Review and graduated magna cum laude in December 2010.
After law school, she served as a law clerk for Judge Judith Rogers of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals before starting as an assistant U.S. attorney in Cleveland. In 2017, she became an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Indiana, rising to chief of the district’s Drug Trafficking Unit in February 2022.
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