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Morgan Lewis set up a task force to expand across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, DLA Piper added an O'Melveny intellectual-property litigation pair in Washington, and Dechert pulled leveraged-finance partner Ben Burton from Kirkland & Ellis in London. Closer to the bottom line, Ropes & Gray will let lawyers count up to 100 hours of AI tool testing toward billing targets, even as AT&T uses its own AI team to pull work away from outside firms.
On the client side, OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue is nearing $50 billion, about $20 billion below earlier figures, SoftBank's Masayoshi Son is seeking up to $100 billion from Gulf investors, and Nvidia-backed Firmus scrapped a $5 billion IPO. Goldman Sachs will hand top executives $500 million in bonuses, and Starbucks is weighing a bid for Chipotle. President Trump said the US will not strike Iran before the midterms, easing oil, while France released diesel reserves as its 10-year yield neared 4.9%.
Now, on to what matters for your practice today.
Today’s Talking Points
-DLA Piper, Dechert and Morgan Lewis build out IP, finance and EMEA; Ropes & Gray puts AI testing on the clock
-AT&T uses AI to pull work from outside firms as in-house automation starts to bite
-McDonald's AI-pricing suit widens the algorithmic-collusion antitrust wave; USA Today sues OpenAI
-OpenAI's revenue runs ~$20bn below prior reports; Firmus pulls a $5bn IPO; SoftBank seeks $100bn
-Starbucks eyes Chipotle; McKesson and CD&R buy Option Care for $5.8bn; Viatris takes Pacira
-White House freezes Microsoft green cards; Fed fines Amex $350m; Goldman pays $500m in bonuses
-Trump rules out an Iran strike before midterms; France's yields and protests keep Europe on edge
Talent Strategy
Latest Moves
DLA Piper hired Robert Shaffer and Sean Trainor as partners in its intellectual property and technology practice in Washington, DC, from O'Melveny & Myers.
Dechert added global finance partner Ben Burton in London from Kirkland & Ellis, bringing leveraged-finance and restructuring experience to its private equity and finance team.
Morgan Lewis, the eleventh-largest US firm by revenue, formed a task force to drive expansion across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, targeting a London market where it has trailed US peers.
RPC opened its first US office in New York with an insurance partner hired from Kaufman Borgeest & Ryan.
What today's moves tell us: hiring is tilting toward IP, finance and cross-border platforms, the kind of build that tracks both AI-driven disputes and a market still pricing complex financings.
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Operations and Strategy
Firms are reworking how they price and staff AI even as clients use the same tools to pull work back in-house.
Ropes & Gray told associates and counsel they can count up to 100 hours of AI tool testing toward their annual billing requirements, a push to speed adoption. The same week, AT&T General Counsel David McAtee said he has deliberately moved document review, research and drafting away from outside firms to a new in-house AI team, a sign automation is starting to eat into junior-lawyer work.
Expansion continued on both sides of the Atlantic, with Morgan Lewis standing up an EMEA task force to close the gap with US rivals in London and UK firm RPC opening in New York with an insurance hire.
The cyber siege on law firms kept producing defendants. A former Sheppard Mullin employee filed a proposed class action over an August data breach that allegedly exposed Social Security numbers, the latest firm pulled into breach litigation.
Practices
Technology: Antitrust, IP and Cybersecurity
AI is now generating as much legal risk as revenue, and general counsel are watching the exposure spread from pricing to copyright to security. A proposed class action accusing McDonald's of using AI to coordinate franchise prices pushes an algorithmic-collusion theory that courts are still splitting on, while fresh copyright and patent fights and a bank hack run on an open-source AI agent point to steady antitrust, IP and cybersecurity work for firms advising both platforms and their targets. Clients increasingly assume their advisers already use AI; what they are paying for is a coherent answer to the liability it creates.
Selected Press:
McDonald's AI-pricing class action claims the chain used software to coordinate menu prices across franchises, the first major algorithmic-pricing antitrust case against a franchise business; similar suits target hotels, landlords and insurers, and the circuits are split.
USA Today and sister papers sued OpenAI in Manhattan federal court, alleging it used their content to train its models without permission.
Qualcomm's licensing fight with Arm heads to a jury, with potentially billions in damages turning on whether Arm breached its agreements and interfered with Qualcomm's Meta dealings.
South Korean banks were hacked using a Chinese open-source AI agent, exposing about 68,000 customers, as Anthropic launched a program offering frontier models to critical-infrastructure defenders.
Corporate M&A and Private Equity
Dealmakers are leaning into carve-outs and sponsor-backed consolidation even with money still expensive, a sign boards are acting on strategic necessity rather than waiting for cheaper financing. The mix of megadeal talk and portfolio pruning points to sell-side, divestiture and acquisition-finance mandates across consumer, healthcare and energy.
Selected Press:
Starbucks is exploring a takeover of Chipotle, a pairing of a roughly $100 billion coffee chain and a $40 billion burrito maker that would reshape fast food.
McKesson and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice agreed to buy infusion provider Option Care Health for about $5.8 billion, betting on rising specialty-drug demand.
Viatris will buy Pacira BioSciences for $1.65 billion in cash at a 45% premium, while KKR-backed Crescent Energy takes Devon Energy's Texas drilling portfolio for $4.2 billion.
Chevron is divesting Hess Midstream and DJ Basin assets in a restructuring carrying a $3-4 billion hit, Coca-Cola is trying to unwind its $5 billion Costa Coffee deal, and Carlyle's deal for Lukoil's foreign assets lapsed under sanctions pressure.
Capital Markets and Private Credit
Financing is splitting between a crowded AI pipeline and investors growing cautious on how private risk is marked. Executives and fund managers are reading OpenAI's revenue restatement and a pulled IPO as a discipline check, even as hedging demand and strains in risk-transfer trades keep structured-finance and valuation lawyers busy.
Selected Press:
OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue is nearing $50 billion, about $20 billion below earlier reports, a gap it will have to reconcile before an IPO expected as soon as next year.
Nvidia-backed Firmus scrapped a $5 billion Australian IPO on market volatility, while Solidigm lined up banks for a $10 billion US listing and Belron targeted a record $35 billion European float.
Waymo closed a $5 billion debt raise backed only by its intellectual property, Goldman arranging and PIMCO, Blackstone and Sixth Street leading, with no Alphabet guarantee.
Sponsors are rushing to hedge floating-rate debt, lifting bank hedging revenue to $2.5 billion in the first half as the Bank of England runs its first private-credit stress test; investors also wrote down two Bank of Ireland risk-transfer deals, and Guggenheim clients pulled $2.4 billion amid a probe into CEO Mark Walter.
Regulatory and White Collar
Enforcement and immigration policy are converging on corporate compliance desks. The White House's move against skilled-worker visas and a large anti-money-laundering fine tell employment, immigration and financial-crime teams to expect heavier workloads, while a Supreme Court fight over prediction markets tests the edge of federal authority.
Selected Press:
The White House suspended green-card sponsorship for Microsoft and consulting firms Infosys, Cognizant and Tata, citing a fraud investigation, and froze related applications.
The Fed fined American Express $350 million over deficiencies in its anti-money-laundering program.
The NFL asked the Supreme Court to let states regulate prediction markets, a jurisdictional test as Kalshi and Polymarket expand.
Where the Work Sits
***
The AI build-out is now a legal engine running in two directions. On the financing side, Waymo’s IP-backed loan, SoftBank’s Gulf fundraising and the rolling chip-debt pipeline point to structured-finance, project-finance and collateral work, with intellectual property increasingly pledged as security. On the risk side, the McDonald’s pricing suit, the USA Today copyright claim and an AI-enabled bank hack push mandates toward antitrust, IP, cybersecurity and AI-governance teams.
Private credit is where the caution is concentrating. Recent cycles have shown that funding-led strains tend to surface first as hedging and mark-to-market problems rather than outright defaults, and this week’s rush to hedge floating-rate debt, the write-downs on Bank of Ireland risk-transfer trades and the Bank of England’s first sector stress test fit that pattern, steering work toward derivatives, structured-finance, valuation and fund-formation teams.
Strategic and sponsor deals keep the corporate pipeline full. Carve-outs at Chevron and Coca-Cola, sponsor buyouts like McKesson-CD&R’s Option Care and KKR-backed Crescent’s Devon purchase, and megadeal talk around Starbucks and Chipotle point to sell-side, antitrust and acquisition-finance mandates across consumer, healthcare and energy.
Policy is opening a compliance front. The visa crackdown on Microsoft and major consultancies, the American Express anti-money-laundering fine and the prediction-markets fight at the Supreme Court channel work toward employment, immigration, financial-crime and regulatory teams whose clients’ models now turn on federal posture.
Global Markets
Rates, oil and European stress still set the tone, and clients are positioning around all three.
Executives and treasurers are weighing financing windows as the Fed’s own minutes show broad support for further tightening after September’s hike. Dealmakers read Trump’s decision to hold off on striking Iran before the midterms as a pressure valve on oil, while fund managers track France’s deepening budget strain and China’s piecemeal stimulus for signals on global demand and the cost of money.
Selected Press:
Trump said the US will not attack Iran before November’s midterms, easing crude after Brent spiked toward $105 on Hormuz attacks and a Gulf hurricane.
China let provinces tap about $82 billion in unused bond quotas to hit its growth target, a move JPMorgan called state-guided and supply-heavy.
France will release 10 million barrels of diesel reserves as student protests build and its 10-year yield nears 4.9%, with the government chasing 43 billion euros in cuts.
Fed minutes showed most officials see more work to do on inflation after the quarter-point hike to 3.75%-4%, with a New York Fed study tying tariffs to a 2.9-point price rise across 67 goods categories.
Stories to Watch
Big-bank earnings next week (JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock) - first read on trading, deal flow and credit quality; Wells reports under a fresh HUD discrimination probe.
Qualcomm v. Arm (today) - a jury could return billions in a licensing fight that ripples across chip-supply deals.
ASML earnings (Wed.) - a bellwether for AI chip demand after record quarters at TSMC and Samsung.
IMF-World Bank annual meetings, Bangkok - debt, thinning fiscal buffers and AI-driven divergence top the agenda.
Hurricane Isaias - a Gulf Coast landfall has already halted about a quarter of regional oil output.
France - student protests, proposed cuts of 43 billion euros and yields near 4.9% keep euro-area stress live.
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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