Good afternoon,
Firms are reaching for two kinds of scarce talent at once: Gulf dealmakers and former regulators. Latham & Watkins is rehiring a three-partner team from Kirkland & Ellis in Riyadh as the Gulf hiring war reopens, while Kirkland's own Texas headcount passed 500. On the enforcement side, Sullivan & Cromwell took former Fox legal chief Viet Dinh, Venable added former SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw, and Labaton relaunched its whistleblower practice with two ex-SEC officials.
On the client side, Silver Lake is merging French software groups Cegid and Silae into a €10bn business, Cerberus is nearing a £1bn deal for Goodwin's defense unit, and the EU signaled it will wave through bigger mergers. Oil topped $100, Canada's tariffs took effect, and the yen firmed before next week's Bank of Japan and Fed meetings.
Now, on to what matters for your practice today.
Today’s Talking Points
-Gulf talent war reopens: Latham rehires a Kirkland Riyadh trio, while Latham PE veteran David Walker prepares to exit London
-Enforcement talent in demand: S&C lands Viet Dinh, Venable adds ex-SEC's Crenshaw, and Labaton relaunches whistleblower work with an ex-SEC duo
-UK Top 50 growth stalls at the top; Kirkland's Texas headcount tops 500
-Silver Lake builds a €10bn French software group; Cerberus nears a £1bn Goodwin defense deal; CVC hires TPG's Todd Sisitsky as co-CEO
-EU opens the door to bigger mergers, even as it keeps watching AI concentration
-Capital markets stretch: record ~$150bn offshore renminbi issuance, AI borrowers crowd the Swiss-franc market, banks offload $138bn of buyout debt
-Private credit pushes into Mexican power and European workouts as Apollo-backed borrowers pay up
-Oil tops $100; Canada's tariffs bite; Bank of Japan and Fed decisions loom next week
Talent Strategy
Latest Moves
Latham & Watkins is rehiring a three-partner team from Kirkland & Ellis in Riyadh, who return after only a couple of years, during a 12-month stretch in which Kirkland logged more partner departures than hires.
Sullivan & Cromwell hired Viet Dinh, Fox Corp.'s former legal chief, nearly three years after he stepped down following the largest media-defamation payout on record.
Venable added former SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw as a partner in Washington.
Labaton Keller Sucharow relaunched its whistleblower representation practice with former SEC Acting Chair Allison Herren Lee and former SEC senior counsel Andrew Feller.
Simpson Thacher hired tax partner Jonathan Westreich in Los Angeles; Cooley added fund-formation partner Michael Black in Chicago; and Katten brought on former Meta IP counsel Brandy Worden in Los Angeles.
Latham & Watkins is losing private-equity veteran David Walker, who helped build its European buyout practice after arriving from Clifford Chance in 2013, a generational shift in London's market.
What today's moves tell us: firms are paying up for two scarce benches, Gulf dealmakers and former government enforcers, while a generational handover plays out at the top of London's private-equity market. When enforcement and regulatory uncertainty rise, clients lean harder on counsel who know the agencies from the inside, and firms pay for that credibility.
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Operations and Strategy
Growth is getting harder to find at the top of the UK market. In the US and the Gulf, firms are leaning on geography, scale to keep the growth engine running.
For the first time since the pandemic, none of the UK's ten largest firms posted double-digit revenue growth over the past financial year, according to the UK Top 50 latest report. Growth instead came from mid-market and smaller firms, a sign of margin pressure at the high end even as the lateral market runs hot.
Kirkland & Ellis added 64 associates across its Texas offices, pushing its headcount past 500 and making it the largest legal presence in the state a decade after it launched there. The build lands as Texas closes the gap with Nevada in the race to pull companies out of Delaware, a shift that steers corporate and governance work toward firms with local scale.
The Gulf talent war is reheating, with Hogan Lovells, Cadwalader, and Latham competing for Saudi and UAE talent after a quieter post-escalation period.
Practices
Private Equity and M&A
Sponsors and strategics are back on offense across software, defense, and carve-outs, and the deals point to sell-side, financing, and antitrust work rather than quiet build-and-hold. Dealmakers are watching how Silver Lake pools data to justify AI spending and how buyers like GE Aerospace pay up for capacity, both signs that boards will transact when the strategic logic is clear.
Selected Press:
Silver Lake is merging Cegid and Silae into a French enterprise-software group worth more than €10bn, with about €1.6bn in revenue, keeping a 66-75% stake and setting up a larger European IPO candidate.
Cerberus is nearing a ~£1bn deal for the defense unit of UK engineering group Goodwin, as private equity keeps chasing defense assets on higher military spending.
CVC hired TPG president Todd Sisitsky as co-CEO from 2028, as it pushes beyond buyouts into credit, infrastructure, and secondaries.
GE Aerospace agreed to buy Consolidated Precision Products from Warburg Pincus and Berkshire Partners for $11.75bn.
Activist Starteepo built a 7.3% stake in Xerox, pushing for a review of its financial-services business.
Antitrust and Merger Control
Brussels' signal that it will clear bigger deals gives boards and sponsors more confidence to attempt large, structurally complex transactions, while flagging AI concentration as the area it will still police. For merger-control teams, a more receptive posture means more filings and more remedy design, not less work.
Selected Press:
EU opens the door to bigger mergers: competition chief Anthony Whelan said the Commission will be more receptive to large deals that strengthen investment, supply security, or global competitiveness, while staying attentive to AI-market concentration.
Large deals test the new posture, from Silver Lake's software tie-up to Poste Italiane's raised $13.2bn offer for Telecom Italia, gauging how much consolidation regulators will allow.
Capital Markets and Private Credit
Borrowers are racing to lock funding before rates climb just as the plumbing is straining. AI issuers are crowding smaller borrowers out of entire currency markets, banks are clearing a post-boom backlog of buyout debt, and private-credit stress is turning into workout and creditor-rights work. Treasurers, sponsors, and lenders are all repricing access to capital at once.
Selected Press:
Offshore renminbi borrowing hit a record ~$150bn this year as issuers, including UBS and Goldman Sachs, tapped lower Chinese rates, pointing to a possible new global funding currency.
US tech borrowers crowded the Swiss-franc market (Alphabet around SFr3bn, Amazon SFr2.82bn), pushing domestic issuers to delay or reprice as AI names near single-company exposure limits.
Banks are offloading ~$138bn of buyout debt, the most since 2007, while companies crowd the US loan market to cut costs and fund M&A.
Gramercy expects Mexican private-credit deployment to rise up to 50% as President Sheinbaum leans on direct lenders to finance power projects.
Apollo-backed companies are paying about one point more for debt than other PE-backed firms; Clearlake's Alkegen filed Chapter 11 to cut $3.1bn of debt; and Europe's direct lenders are adopting US-style workouts as the credit cycle turns.
Where the Work Sits
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The AI buildout so far has run into power limits rather than a shortage of ideas, and the scramble fits the pattern, which is why the work keeps flowing to project finance, structured finance, and capital-markets teams. The Swiss-franc crowding, the record renminbi issuance, and new listed vehicles for data-center assets are all ways to move capital to the same constrained infrastructure.
Private-credit stress is showing up as a funding-and-workout problem, not only a credit-quality one. Apollo's borrowing premium, Alkegen's Chapter 11, and European lenders importing US-style workouts point to liability-management, creditor-rights, and special-situations mandates, while Mexican power financing opens direct-lending and project work.
The EU's friendlier posture toward large mergers, set against Silver Lake's software roll-up and Cerberus's defense carve-out, puts merger-control filings, remedy design, and cross-border diligence back at the center of deal execution, with AI concentration the one area where scrutiny is rising.
Economic statecraft is now the operating system for cross-border deals: oil above $100, fresh Canadian tariffs, and China's widening surplus keep sanctions, customs, export-controls, and energy teams busy mapping exposure as the rules change week to week.
Global Markets
The macro backdrop is tightening from three directions at once: energy, trade, and rates.
Clients are positioning for a higher-for-a-bit-longer world. Treasurers are weighing whether to pull issuance forward before next week’s Fed and Bank of Japan meetings. Energy-exposed boards are re-running cost scenarios as oil tops $100, and companies with North American supply chains are mapping exposure to Canada’s new tariffs. Decision-makers are also watching Japan, where a possible rate hike and a pension-fund reallocation could move the yen and, with it, demand for US Treasuries.
Selected Press:
Brent topped $100 for the first time in weeks on US-Iran strikes and a rebound in Chinese buying.
Canada’s 15-50% retaliatory tariffs on about $20bn of US goods took effect, and Trump moved to cut Canadian products from federal contracts and threatened Bombardier.
The Bank of Japan is leaning toward a quarter-point hike on Sept. 18, as Treasury Secretary Bessent dared traders to bet against the yen and markets watch for a GPIF allocation shift.
China’s exports jumped 25% in August and consumer inflation accelerated, widening the trade surplus before a planned Xi-Trump summit.
UK sold 30-year gilts at a 5.8% yield, the highest since 1998, as the global bond selloff ran on ahead of the Sept. 15-16 Fed meeting.
Stories to Watch
Oracle earnings (Thursday) — a read on AI and data-center demand and cloud backlog.
US CPI (Friday) — core inflation ahead of the Fed, with markets split on a September hike.
FOMC decision (Sept. 15-16) — a live hike would compress refinancing and deal-financing timelines.
Bank of Japan (Sept. 18) — a quarter-point hike and any GPIF reallocation could move the yen and Treasuries.
ECB decision (Sept. 10) — another hike is expected as euro-area inflation runs near 3%.
Anthropic’s ~$100bn IPO (mid-October) — the anchor of a crowded listings calendar.
That’s the rundown. See you next where law meets the markets.
-The BigLaw Markets Team
*DISCLAIMER: BigLaw Markets analyzes publicly available information, filings, press releases, and news stories published by reputable media sources to deliver content that highlights demand for legal services. Certain production processes may be supported by proprietary AI tools and are subject to human editorial judgement and review.
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