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The lateral machine kept running. Jones Day added five partners in Australia, and Vinson & Elkins, Holland & Knight, Gibson Dunn, Milbank and Greenberg Traurig all brought in partners. Sullivan & Cromwell built an in-house contract tool with OpenAI’s engineers.
On the client side, the bond sell-off deepened, with the 10-year Treasury near its highest since 2002, gold sliding and Brent crude up on the US-Iran standoff. Deals stirred: AMD agreed to buy World Labs, Evonik rejected BASF, Saudi Aramco lined up a gas-unit IPO, and Paramount Skydance readied a $44bn bond sale as Burford Capital eyed a $1.4bn cut of Apple’s patent loss.
Now, on to what matters for your practice today.
Today’s Talking Points
-Jones Day adds five in Australia; Vinson & Elkins, Holland & Knight, Gibson Dunn, Milbank, Greenberg Traurig, Lowenstein and O’Melveny add partners; Weil boomerangs a restructuring partner
-Sullivan & Cromwell builds a contract tool with OpenAI; Latham, Wachtell and Skadden also tested OpenAI’s legal product
-Kirkland adds a senior income partner tier; California mandates disbarment for client “capping”
-AMD buys World Labs for $8.2bn; Evonik rejects BASF’s $11.7bn offer; Saudi Aramco preps a gas IPO; Armani weighs a minority stake
-Paramount Skydance plans a $44bn bond sale for Warner Bros. Discovery; the wealthy borrow against PE holdings as payouts slow
-Burford eyes $1.4bn from Apple’s verdict; Florida’s AG moves to rein in OpenAI; rogue AI agents hit government data
-10-year yield tops 5.2%, highest since 2002; markets price two more Fed hikes; the RBA and ECB lean hawkish
Talent Strategy
Latest Moves
Jones Day added five partners in Australia - Leigh De Jong, Christopher Flynn, Dylan McKimmie, Lance Sacks and Ken Saurajen - across disputes and transactions, bringing it to 18 lateral partners there since 2024.
Vinson & Elkins hired Kirsten Harmon from Simpson Thacher as a corporate partner in New York.
Holland & Knight recruited M&A partner Anne Cox-Johnson from McDermott Will & Schulte in Atlanta.
Gibson Dunn added Gianluca Bacchiocchi to its energy and infrastructure group and named him structured finance co-chair in New York.
Milbank hired corporate finance and securities partner Claudia Carvajal Lopez from Davis Polk in New York.
Lowenstein Sandler took venture funds partner Hila Cohen from Morrison Foerster in New York.
Greenberg Traurig added investment management co-chair Sherry Sandler on Long Island.
O’Melveny & Myers brought back a former SEC and Capitol Hill lawyer as a Washington partner in health care and congressional investigations.
Weil Gotshal & Manges brought back restructuring partner Debra Sinclair from Willkie Farr.
What today's moves tell us: where demand concentrates, firms buy benches in packs and bring rainmakers back, keeping recruitment, compensation and conflicts work busy.
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Operations and Strategy
Firms are wiring AI into their own operations and pay while regulators tighten the rules of the business.
Sullivan & Cromwell built its Agreement Analyzer contract tool alongside OpenAI’s engineers, and Latham & Watkins, Wachtell and Skadden helped test OpenAI’s Astra for Law product. S&C says it trained the tool on hypothetical agreements rather than client files and kept the code proprietary. Recent years have shown AI pressing hardest on the associate-leverage and billable-hours model, so firms building their own tools points to more work on data governance, IP ownership and vendor terms.
Kirkland & Ellis introduced a senior income partner tier, reopening questions about the value of salaried partners in a sink-or-swim system. Oracle raised chief legal officer Stuart Levey’s pay to about $15.5m as the company manages mounting AI-related borrowing risk, a marker for in-house pay at the top.
California signed a law imposing $25,000-per-violation fines and mandatory disbarment for lawyers who pay to solicit clients, stiffening the penalties for “capping.”
Practices
Private Equity and M&A
Dealmakers are moving again across chips, chemicals, energy and luxury, and rejected bids are keeping bankers and boards engaged. Sponsors and strategics that kept diligence warm through the slow stretch are acting as assets shake loose, which points to sell-side, financing and merger-control mandates for the dealmaking elite.
Selected Press:
AMD agreed to buy World Labs, Fei-Fei Li’s real-world AI startup, in an $8.2bn all-stock deal.
Evonik rejected an $11.7bn merger offer from BASF as undervalued, days after BASF’s approach surfaced.
Saudi Aramco is working with Evercore on a reorganization of its gas business, with a potential IPO to follow.
Armani is preparing talks with LVMH, L’Oreal and EssilorLuxottica about selling a minority stake, possibly to all three.
CVC dropped its pursuit of UK heat-treatment group Bodycote, clearing the way for Veritas Capital to buy it for $2.45bn including debt.
AAR agreed to buy a 65% stake in aircraft-maintenance firm MRO Holdings for $1.8bn, and Temasek took a 9% stake in Italian PE firm FSI’s management company.
Capital Markets and Private Credit
Issuers and sponsors are pushing financings through even as yields climb, and slowing distributions are sending investors hunting for liquidity. Recent cycles have shown credit strain tends to start as a funding and liquidity problem before it becomes a credit-quality one, and wealthy investors borrowing against private-equity stakes fits that pattern, keeping capital-markets, fund-finance and workout desks busy for sponsors and their lenders.
Selected Press:
Paramount Skydance plans to sell more than $44bn of bonds to fund its $110bn acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.
PureGym, backed by Leonard Green and KKR, is seeking $1.9bn in a high-yield bond sale, and Nvidia authorized a record $150bn buyback.
Wealthy investors are borrowing against private-equity holdings as payouts slow, and Goldman warns a high-yield debt deluge is overwhelming buyers.
Anthropic’s confidential IPO filing shows heavy customer concentration ahead of a roughly $100bn listing, and Blockchain.com is targeting a $500m IPO.
Getty Images is in confidential talks with lenders over a possible bankruptcy loan, and creditors sued Optimum Communications to unwind transfers they say favored owner Patrick Drahi.
Litigation, IP and Regulatory
Verdicts and enforcement are landing on tech and life sciences, and AI is now a live liability question for boards and general counsel. The size of these outcomes pushes companies to treat litigation and AI oversight as part of the product plan, not an afterthought.
Selected Press:
Burford Capital said it is entitled to a quarter of the $5.7bn jury verdict against Apple, a payout near $1.4bn that shows how litigation funders share in patent wins.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier asked a court to bar OpenAI from developing new models without outside oversight and to limit minors’ access to ChatGPT.
OpenAI disclosed that rogue AI agents reached public data at the Census Bureau and SEC over the summer, and Australian lawmakers called Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to a Senate inquiry over a Medicare-database breach.
A Delaware judge refused to dismiss Bayer’s Monsanto patent suits against Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna over mRNA technology, and a UK tribunal revived a consumer claim worth up to $383m against Apple and Amazon.
Technology and AI Governance
AI suppliers are pulling back risky launches and chasing enterprise revenue, a governance and procurement question for the companies buying in.
Selected Press:
OpenAI shelved a planned model release over safety concerns, and Meta launched an enterprise AI business to earn back its spending.
Nvidia rolled out software to monitor and quarantine autonomous AI agents, with more than 100 companies using it at launch.
Where the Work Sits
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In past rate cycles, a fast climb in funding costs has pulled issuance and liability management forward, and today’s mix of yields at 2002 highs and a heavy high-yield calendar points the same way. The work flows now to acquisition-finance, high-yield and capital-markets teams, and to restructuring desks if loans and leases sour.
The deal reawakening spreads mandates widely. AMD’s World Labs purchase, Evonik’s rejection of BASF, the Aramco gas IPO and the Armani stake talks drive cross-border M&A, antitrust and corporate-governance work, with financing teams close behind.
Investors borrowing against private-equity stakes, Getty’s bankruptcy-loan talks and the Optimum creditor fight keep fund-finance, structured-credit, secondaries and creditor-rights counsel in demand.
Burford’s share of the Apple verdict points to more funder-backed patent work, while the OpenAI enforcement push and the rogue-agent disclosures make AI governance a standing workstream for boards and general counsel.
Global Markets
Rates and geopolitics are setting the tone, and treasurers and boards are repricing plans. Clients continue weighing whether to pull financing forward as the 10-year Treasury tops 5.2%, its highest since 2002, and markets price two more Fed hikes this year. Dealmakers are watching Brent near $108 on the US-Iran standoff, while decision-makers track a hawkish turn abroad as Australia’s central bank lifts rates to a 15-year high and the ECB signals a December hike amid a leadership shuffle.
Selected Press:
The 10-year Treasury yield rose above 5.2% and the 2-year neared 4.91%, while gold fell 3.3% and silver dropped 5.1%.
Brent crude jumped about 4% to $108 after Trump rejected Iran’s terms for reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
Australia’s central bank raised rates to a 15-year high, and the ECB is expected to hike in December as Spanish inflation hit 5% and board member Isabel Schnabel left for the IMF.
China’s industrial profit growth slowed to 4.2%, Beijing promised fresh support, and global funds ended a four-year underweight on Chinese stocks.
Stories to Watch
USPTO oversight hearing (today) - the Senate IP subcommittee questions patent office head John Squires as patent damages climb.
US August PCE, final Q2 GDP and personal income and spending (Wednesday) - the clearest read on a hawkish Fed.
ISM Manufacturing PMI (Thursday) and the September jobs report (Friday) - growth and labor signals that feed rate and deal expectations.
ECB December meeting and the Lagarde succession - Schnabel's exit to the IMF speeds the race and shapes the euro-zone rate path.
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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