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Debevoise & Plimpton is poaching Neal Reenan and Ian Bushner, the partners who led Freshfields' New York private capital practice, less than three years after they arrived from Latham & Watkins. Kirkland & Ellis and Latham & Watkins finished the first nine months atop the M&A league tables even as dealmaking cooled, and a Manhattan judge warned that firms leaning on AI risk hollowing out the training of young lawyers.
On the client side, a weak September jobs report knocked an October Fed rate hike off the table, yet long yields climbed as France's budget crisis dragged the euro to a 17-month low. Global M&A slid to $986 billion in the third quarter, Schneider Electric lined up a $20 billion deal for PTC, and banks began syndicating $60 billion of AI chip financing.
Now, on to what matters for your practice today.
Today’s Talking Points
-Debevoise lands Freshfields' New York private capital leaders
-Kirkland and Latham top the M&A tables as third-quarter deal volume drops
-Baker McKenzie adds a Kirkland partner for congressional investigations before the midterms
-Global M&A falls to $986bn / Schneider Electric nears a $20bn deal for PTC
-Banks syndicate $60bn of AI chip financing as chip-backed lending widens
-Weak September jobs cool Fed hike bets / France's crisis drags the euro to a 17-month low
-Trump names an AI task force / Amazon drops data-center NDAs and pledges $1bn to communities
-The Supreme Court opens a new term weighing climate, immigration and gun cases
Talent Strategy
Latest Moves
Debevoise & Plimpton hired Neal Reenan and Ian Bushner, who co-led Freshfields' private capital practice in New York, as M&A partners; the pair advised CVC on its $925 million carve-out of Therakos and had joined Freshfields from Latham & Watkins only in 2024.
The move extends a private-capital build at Debevoise, which since June has also taken Freshfields funds co-head Mary Lavelle, Weil Gotshal & Manges partner Karen Chao and Ropes & Gray partner Andrea Hwang.
Baker McKenzie hired Kirkland & Ellis partner Allison Murphy to co-lead its congressional investigations practice, positioning for oversight fights after next month's midterms.
Taylor Wessing and Stephenson Harwood confirmed merger talks that would create one of the larger UK-rooted firms, a sign mid-market London players are chasing scale.
What today's moves tell us: US firms still prize portable private-capital books and ex-regulators, and the raids on UK firms' American benches are not slowing.
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Operations and Strategy
Law firms are posting record headcount and league-table wins even as the deal market thins and AI presses on how work gets priced and staffed.
The legal sector set another employment record in September, reaching 1.25 million US jobs and still outpacing a weak overall labor market. The demand is concentrated: Kirkland & Ellis and Latham & Watkins finished the first nine months atop the M&A tables by value and volume, per LSEG, even as third-quarter activity cooled.
AI is reshaping how that work is priced and taught. Manhattan US District Judge Arun Subramanian warned that heavy reliance on AI could stunt junior-lawyer training and harm clients, even as he declined to sanction attorneys for AI-generated errors in a filing. California's new law on lawyers' use of generative AI, the first such regime in the country, is forcing firms to decide when AI use must be disclosed.
Fee pressure shows in restructuring too: Gibson Dunn collected more than $7.1 million from LIV Golf while cutting its rates 20% for the Saudi-backed circuit's bankruptcy, a reminder that even premium mandates now carry negotiated discounts.
Practices
Corporate M&A and Private Equity
Dealmakers pulled back in the third quarter, but the slide looks more like a pause than a retreat: strategic buyers and sponsors are still moving on technology and industrial assets, and advisers expect activity to pick up before the midterms and any antitrust tightening that follows. A slowdown rarely erases strategic agendas; it stacks them into a backlog that clears once boards regain visibility, pointing to steady sell-side, carve-out and financing mandates.
Selected Press:
Global M&A fell to $986 billion in the third quarter from nearly $1.7 trillion, down 13% year on year, with megadeals above $10 billion dropping to 10 and AstraZeneca's proposed $400 billion tie-up with Bristol Myers Squibb abandoned.
Schneider Electric is near a roughly $20 billion deal for Boston software maker PTC, a 25% premium that would be its largest acquisition.
Novartis struck a $7.8 billion mRNA licensing deal with China's Abogen, and CSL agreed a $1.6 billion tie-up with Switzerland's Alentis Therapeutics.
KKR, Blackstone and Warburg Pincus are weighing $3.4 billion bids for windshield-repair group Cary, owned by CVC and Nordic Capital.
Capital Markets, AI Infrastructure Finance and Private Credit
The IPO window is open but selective, and the bigger story is how the AI build-out gets financed, with lenders wrapping chips and customer contracts into new credit structures. In past cycles private-credit strain has shown up first as a funding and valuation problem rather than a credit-quality one, so this week's fund overhauls and gated vehicles point fund-formation, valuation and creditor-rights teams toward work well before anything looks like default.
Selected Press:
Banks are syndicating about $60 billion of AI chip financing, a $42 billion senior tranche plus an $18 billion junior piece led by Blackstone, to fund chips for Anthropic, while Amazon seeks to sell about $8 billion of Nvidia chips to investors and lease them back.
Lambda secured a delayed-draw term loan of more than $1 billion at 6.78% to buy over 30,000 Nvidia GPUs, an investment-grade-rated facility of the kind neoclouds increasingly use.
Wall Street's IPO revival cooled on soft demand, even as Anthropic set a pre-IPO investor day ahead of a $100 billion listing and Mynt lined up an $844 million IPO.
Partners Group is overhauling its $7.7 billion flagship private equity fund, splitting out weaker assets, while Investcorp raised $1.2 billion for a new North American fund.
Germany's state-owned SEFE hired Lazard to explore a re-privatization, and BT weighed a higher offer for Toscafund-backed broadband group TalkTalk.
AI, Regulation and IP
Washington is moving to shape AI policy and industry relations just as the technology keeps generating disputes. For general counsel and boards, AI governance, content-licensing and data-rights work is now a standing line item rather than a one-off.
Selected Press:
The Trump administration named Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton to lead a new AI task force due to report on the technology's risks within 120 days, with FTC chair Andrew Ferguson and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent among its members.
Amazon pledged $1 billion over five years to communities near its data centers and said it would stop requiring local governments to sign NDAs, easing permitting and political friction around the AI build-out.
The 8th Circuit paused Minnesota's first-in-the-nation ban on AI-generated fake nude images while Elon Musk's xAI challenges it as unconstitutional.
Litigation, Antitrust and Enforcement
The Supreme Court's new term and a run of regulatory settlements keep defense, antitrust and appellate teams busy, with the government on both sides of the docket. Companies are reading the term for how far the Court will go on executive power, immigration and climate liability.
Selected Press:
The Supreme Court opened its term today and will hear ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy's bid to kill a Boulder, Colorado climate-damages suit, alongside cases on mandatory immigration detention, gun rights and religion in schools.
Liquor distributor Southern Glazer's agreed not to charge small retailers far more than chains, settling an FTC price-discrimination case that signals renewed Robinson-Patman enforcement.
Qualcomm and Arm head back to trial in their licensing fight, with large damages at stake over chip-design contracts.
The Independent Community Bankers of America sued the OCC, claiming it overstepped by granting bank charters to crypto firms.
Where the Work Sits
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The AI build-out is turning into legal work faster than it turns into megawatts. This cycle has hit the same wall, first power and permitting, now the structure of financing itself, and the $60 billion chip syndication, Lambda’s rated GPU loan and Amazon’s sale-and-leaseback point to more structured-finance, project-finance and credit-ratings mandates. Amazon’s move to drop data-center NDAs adds siting and community-agreement work on top.
Dealmaking’s slowdown is redistributing, not shrinking, mandates. Recut and remedy-driven deals, cross-border tie-ups like Schneider-PTC and a thinner but larger pipeline keep merger-control, financing and carve-out teams busy, and the bet on a pre-midterm pickup favors firms with deep M&A and antitrust benches.
Private capital is the other engine. Fund overhauls at Partners Group, re-privatizations like SEFE and distressed situations at TalkTalk and LIV Golf steer work toward liability management, creditor rights and fund formation, where documentation and valuation disputes pay premium rates.
AI oversight is becoming its own practice. A federal AI task force, California’s lawyer-disclosure rule, Minnesota’s contested image law and Google’s publisher licensing keep AI-governance, IP, privacy and regulatory teams in steady demand.
Global Markets
A soft US jobs print cooled the Fed, but Europe’s fiscal stress is now the louder signal.
Executives and treasurers are weighing whether the October reprieve on US rate hikes is a genuine turn or a pause before a December move, while dealmakers watch France’s crisis and a tightening oil market for the next shock. The message to clients is that the cost of money has reset, but so has the cost of waiting, keeping financing and issuance decisions on boardroom agendas.
Selected Press:
US payrolls rose just 29,000 in September and unemployment ticked up to 4.2%, cutting October Fed hike odds to about 22% from 64%, though economists still expect a December move.
France’s 10-year yield neared 5%, its highest since 2002, and the euro fell to a 17-month low as budget turmoil stoked contagion fears in Italy and prompted a snap-election call in Spain.
Euro-zone inflation jumped to 3.8%, the highest in two years, driven by an 18.8% rise in energy costs.
The G7 agreed to release about 100 million barrels of oil and diesel as OPEC+ held November output steady, while Saudi Aramco’s chief warned global stockpiles are “scarily thin” after the Iran conflict.
Stories to Watch
Supreme Court term (opens today) - oral arguments in the Exxon and Suncor climate case, plus cases on immigration detention, guns and religion, set the year’s litigation agenda.
ISM Services PMI (today) - a read on the dominant US sector as the labor market softens.
Fed meeting (Oct. 27-28) - markets price only about a 22% chance of a hike, with attention shifting to a possible December move.
Anthropic pre-IPO investor day (next week) - a gauge of demand ahead of its $100 billion listing and a crowded IPO calendar.
OPEC+ (Nov. 1) and the G7 fuel release (within 20 days) - key to whether oil stays near $100 amid the Hormuz standoff.
Earnings: Levi’s (Wed) and PepsiCo (Thu) - consumer reads after Nike flagged weak guidance and job cuts.
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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