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Mayer Brown, Paul Hastings, Haynes Boone and Sidley Austin all posted partner hires, Simpson Thacher's run of private equity recruits laid bare the fight for deal talent, and Reddit asked a court to pull Proskauer Rose off a rival's case.
On the client side, Intel and Broadcom's chiefs warned that financing, not chips or power, is now the real limit on the AI build-out, even as Anthropic lines up a $6.3 billion data center in Japan. Private equity found €41 billion of room for dividend recaps, Bumble is headed private at $1 billion, and the DOJ opened an antitrust probe into the big TV networks.
Now, on to what matters for your practice today.
Today’s Talking Points
-Partner hires at Mayer Brown, Paul Hastings, Haynes Boone and Sidley; Simpson Thacher's 33-strong PE recruiting run
-Reddit moves to disqualify Proskauer; DLA Piper builds private credit with a Latham trio
-PE taps €41bn of dividend-recap headroom; Bumble goes private at $1bn; Amazon eyes Decart; BASF weighs a higher Evonik bid
-Intel and Broadcom warn of an AI capital crunch; Anthropic plans a $6.3bn Japan data center; Microsoft debuts the Maia 300
-DOJ probes ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC on antitrust; Getty Images and Character.AI head to bankruptcy
-Hedge funds buy LA wildfire subrogation claims; 1MDB nears a Deutsche Bank settlement
-IMF flags bond yields as top risk; the BOJ leans past October; US CPI lands Wednesday
Talent Strategy
Latest Moves
Mayer Brown hired capital markets partner Danielle Abada, a former CFTC lawyer, into its New York office.
Paul Hastings added high yield partner Roberto Bruno from Cravath, Swaine & Moore in London.
Haynes Boone recruited restructuring partner Linton Bloomberg from Reed Smith in London.
Sidley Austin hired investment funds partner Justin Solomon from Kirkland & Ellis in Los Angeles to expand its private equity work.
DLA Piper is adding three senior lawyers from Latham & Watkins to its capital solutions group as it pushes further into private credit.
Mayer Brown's white collar build reunited the investigators behind the UNC academic-fraud report.
Simpson Thacher & Bartlett has hired at least 33 partners in 2026 who serve private equity clients, 17 of them in New York — a marker of how far firms will stretch pay to hold the PE bench.
What today's moves tell us: private equity, private credit and capital markets are still the benches firms are paying up to deepen, in New York and London alike.
Check our Rolodex newsletter delivered on Monday at 7:30 am for a weekly overview of the lateral market and executive moves.
Operations and Strategy
Firms are spending to build in private credit, white collar and private equity while a conflicts fight and a funding ruling test how they manage clients.
The build-out is deliberate. DLA Piper's capital-solutions hires and Mayer Brown's white collar additions follow the money into private credit and investigations, and Simpson Thacher's 33 private-equity partner hires this year show the same pattern at the high end: pay concentrated where deal and credit demand sits.
Growth also brings friction. Reddit asked a federal judge to disqualify its former firm Proskauer Rose from defending Perplexity AI, saying it was dropped "like a hot potato" by lawyers who still owed it loyalty — a reminder that lateral-heavy expansion and client mobility keep conflicts and professional-responsibility work live.
In London, the High Court ruled that Pogust Goodhead keeps its lead claimant role in the Mariana Dam group action after finding a client committee had no power to switch firms, a win for the litigation-funding model. Separately, HSBC said it will phase out fixed-pay allowances from 2028.
Practices
Private Equity and M&A
Sponsors are finding room to act even with financing expensive, and dealmakers are reading the day's activity as a fuller calendar of recaps, take-privates and strategic M&A. The market has seen this setup before: when sponsors sit on unsold assets and financing stays open at the edges, dividend recaps and take-privates tend to run ahead of outright exits, pulling leveraged-finance and sell-side teams forward.
Selected Press:
PE-owned companies across EMEA have about €41bn of borrowing headroom for dividend recaps before risking downgrades, per Moody's, with sponsors holding $3.8tn of unsold assets and holding periods stretched to seven years.
Bumble is in advanced talks to go private at about $1bn with a holding company founded by ex-Sequoia partner Ravi Gupta and former Meta executive John Hegeman.
Amazon is in talks to buy AI startup Decart for about $7bn, while BASF may raise its offer for Evonik after an $11.7bn bid was rejected.
Mubadala, the $385bn Abu Dhabi fund, is steering more capital toward China, India, Japan and South Korea.
Investment banks are expanding London teams to chase a UK M&A rebound, with Citi and JPMorgan citing a shortage of senior dealmakers.
AI, Capital Markets and Financing
Financing discipline, not hardware, is where the AI build-out is being tested, and credit and capital markets teams are setting terms. When capital rather than power becomes the binding constraint, the work shifts toward structuring, disclosure and the terms lenders attach.
Selected Press:
Intel and Broadcom's chief executives warned that rising borrowing costs and uncertain returns, not chip or power shortages, may become the main brake on AI expansion.
A Bloomberg analysis tied the AI boom's circular financing — vendors funding the customers who buy their products — to global capital inflows and comparisons with 2008.
Anthropic is in final talks with NTT Data to build its first Japan data center, up to 500 MW and as much as ¥1tn ($6.3bn), targeting a 2028 start.
Microsoft unveiled its Maia 300 chip and a plan for multi-gigawatt deployments next year to cut its reliance on Nvidia.
Tencent launched a $5bn bond sale to fund AI capex, while JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs declined to underwrite $3.7bn of a $5bn package for AI startup Volta Infrastructure.
Regulatory, Antitrust and Investigations
Enforcement is widening across media, asset management and cross-border fraud, and general counsel are watching antitrust and white-collar exposure spread. Each item is a prompt for competition, regulatory and investigations teams to engage early.
Selected Press:
The DOJ is investigating Disney's ABC, Paramount's CBS, CNN, Fox News and Comcast's NBC for possible antitrust violations after they suspended pooled White House coverage.
Goldman Sachs's $2.3bn deal has drawn scrutiny of tax-smart ETF structures.
Malaysia's 1MDB is in talks to settle with Deutsche Bank over a $4.5bn fraud.
Corcept Therapeutics is trying to bar a retired appeals judge's testimony in its antitrust fight with Teva.
Litigation and Restructuring
Disputes are increasingly attached to claims, patents and distressed balance sheets. Restructuring is now as much balance-sheet engineering and claims trading as it is outright distress.
Selected Press:
Hedge funds are buying insurers' subrogation claims from the 2025 LA wildfires — Eaton fire claims near 55–60 cents on the dollar, Palisades claims 3–5 cents — as California's curbs stall.
MIT sued Amazon in Boston, alleging Amazon Web Services' data-security technology infringes two patents.
Albertsons is demanding $9bn from Kroger over their collapsed $25bn merger.
Getty Images plans a Chapter 11 filing and a move to go private; Character.AI filed for bankruptcy and agreed to sell assets for $20m.
Where the Work Sits
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AI continues keeping capital-markets and regulatory lawyers busy: data-centre REITs need shelf registrations, hyperscaler capex raises covenant questions, and the semiconductor export-control regime requires ongoing sanctions diligence. Firms with strong project-finance and trade-compliance desks—Milbank, White & Case, Freshfields—are cross-selling into tech clients that previously used them only for M&A.
Private equity supplies the deal work. €41 bn of dividend-recap headroom in European LBO portfolios and a push by Apollo, Ares, and HPS into direct-originated infrastructure debt mean sponsor-side counsel—Kirkland, Simpson Thacher, Latham—keep adding leverage-finance partners while fund-formation groups draft side-letter libraries for the next vintage.
Regulation and investigations round out the demand picture. Brussels is transposing the AI Act's high-risk obligations into member-state law, the DOJ antitrust division is staffing up for conduct cases in ad-tech and health-care data, and the SEC's crypto-enforcement unit still has a full docket despite leadership turnover. Cleary, Cravath, and WilmerHale remain top picks for bet-the-company government-facing work.
Litigation and restructuring sit on the other side of the cycle clock. Defaults in commercial real estate and sponsor-backed health-care chains are feeding mandates to Weil, Davis Polk, and Akin, while mass-tort inventories—PFAS, talc successor cases, social-media youth claims—sustain trial-lawyer hiring at Quinn Emanuel and plaintiffs' shops that compete for the same associates.
Global Markets
The IMF's latest World Economic Outlook leaves its 2025 global growth forecast at 3.2 % but flags rising tail risks from trade-policy uncertainty and fiscal slippage in advanced economies. For law firms, the practical read-through is that cross-border deal documentation will keep carrying longer force-majeure and sanctions-fallback language, and lenders will press for tighter MAC clauses.
Selected Press:
Christopher Waller at the Fed reiterated that rate cuts remain data-dependent, with core PCE still running above target. Markets now price the first 25 bp cut in September rather than July, which pushes out the refinancing wave sponsors have been waiting for—and extends the window for restructuring advisors.
The Bank of Japan held its policy rate at 0.5 % but signaled a possible move in Q3 if wage-growth data confirm a virtuous cycle. A tightening BOJ would strengthen the yen, compressing carry-trade returns and potentially triggering margin calls that ripple into U.S. credit markets—exactly the cross-border volatility that keeps Sullivan & Cromwell's and Davis Polk's capital-markets desks busy.
India's inflation eased to 4.3 %, giving the RBI room for another cut. The country's infrastructure-spending pipeline and PLI manufacturing incentives are pulling foreign-direct-investment mandates to firms with Mumbai or Singapore offices—Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas on the local side, Linklaters and Freshfields internationally.
OPEC+ confirmed it will unwind voluntary output cuts beginning in June, adding roughly 400 k bbl/d each month through year-end. Lower crude prices tighten cash flow for Gulf sovereign wealth funds that have been anchor LPs in Western private-equity vehicles—a dynamic worth watching for fund-formation lawyers drafting the next round of co-invest side letters.
U.S. bank earnings this week will be the first real test of whether higher-for-longer rates are finally biting into commercial-loan books. Charge-off guidance from JPMorgan, Citi, and Wells Fargo will set the tone for leveraged-lending activity in Q3 and, by extension, the deal flow reaching sponsor-side law firms.
Stories to Watch
Skadden–Paul Weiss lateral race: Both firms are circling the same handful of elite M&A partners in London and Hong Kong. Whichever lands them first reshapes the league-table math for European cross-border deals in 2026.
SEC v. Coinbase remand hearing (Oct 17): The Second Circuit sent the case back with pointed questions about the "investment contract" framework. The ruling will determine whether token-listing counsel need to run full Howey analyses—or can rely on the exchange's own legal opinion.
Senate Judiciary markup of the AI Liability Act: A bipartisan draft would create a rebuttable presumption of negligence for deployers of "high-risk" AI systems. If it advances, every firm with a tech-transactions practice will need to retool contract templates and insurance advice.
Kirkland's fund-formation headcount: The firm quietly added six fund-formation partners in Q3 across Chicago, New York, and London. That pace signals the firm expects a 2026 fundraising vintage large enough to justify the overhead—worth tracking against actual LP commitments.
PFAS multi-district litigation settlement talks: Mediator proposals are reportedly in the $30–35 bn range for the public-water-system track. A deal at that level would free up plaintiffs'-side capacity for the next wave—personal-injury PFAS claims—and trigger a hiring cycle at trial boutiques.
Bank of Japan rate decision (Oct 31): A surprise hike would jolt yen carry trades, widen credit spreads, and accelerate the restructuring pipeline that has been building in leveraged-loan portfolios. Cross-border insolvency specialists should have pitch decks ready.
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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