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Fox Rothschild shook off a proposed class action over its May data breach, a rare win for a firm as Big Law's run of breach litigation grinds on. In-house, general counsel kept moving to the center of corporate strategy: Spotify named Kevan Choset its permanent general counsel, and Del Monte's Effie Silva led a $285 million asset purchase.
On the client side, the AI trade cracked. Intel's guidance miss and Amazon's cash burn handed the Nasdaq its worst day since June, gold slid to a one-year low, and Fed officials lined up behind more rate hikes. Oil held near $113 a barrel on Iran risk as Exxon and Chevron profits surged, while Starbucks moved to sell its China business and Japanese buyers chased $21 billion of US gas.
Now, on to what matters for your practice today.
Today’s Talking Points
-Latham, Sullivan & Cromwell, and CMS are hiring across defining practices
-Fox Rothschild escapes a data-breach class action as Big Law's cyber wave rolls on
-In-house spotlight — Spotify names Choset permanent GC; Del Monte's Silva leads a $285M deal
-AI selloff deepens — Intel miss and Amazon cash burn hand the Nasdaq its worst day since June
-Fed hawks at the Dallas and St. Louis Feds push for more hikes as gold hits a one-year low
-Exxon and Chevron profits surge on war-driven refining margins; OPEC+ holds December targets
-Starbucks moves to divest China; Japanese groups chase $21B of US Gulf Coast gas
-Junk-debt "bloodbath" and data-center delays sharpen creditor and project-finance risk
-Watch: Tuesday's US midterms, October payrolls, and the ISM manufacturing read
Talent Strategy
Latest Moves
Latham & Watkins hired five energy partners, including Baker Botts’ global projects leader Jason Bennett, as the firm builds a Houston base for a worldwide energy projects business.
Sullivan & Cromwell hired Ryan Shores from Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton as a Washington, D.C.-based partner and co-head of its antitrust group.
CMS has hired Gabriela Kennedy, Mayer Brown’s former global intellectual property co-head, as a partner in Hong Kong, filling the gap left by Jonathan Chu’s recent move to Clifford Chance.
What today's moves tell us: energy and antitrust are the clearest talent signal telling how firms value the AI buildout and transactional approvals by the DOJ.
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 still working through the fallout of this year's cyber siege, where a firm can be victim and defendant at once.
Fox Rothschild escaped a proposed class action after three plaintiffs, who had alleged the firm failed to protect personal information exposed in a May data breach, dismissed their claims. The outcome shows breach litigation against firms can be fought off, but only after the incident-response, notification, and defense costs have already been spent.
The dismissal lands in a year when a string of large firms disclosed breaches and drew proposed class actions. For firm management, the episode keeps data governance, cyber-insurance, and client-security demands near the top of the operational agenda, and it sharpens the question of how much breach-defense and incident-response work firms will keep doing for themselves rather than steering to specialist counsel.
Practices
Capital Markets and Private Credit
The strain beneath the AI trade is where demand is shifting, and it is moving from writing new credit to managing the credit already on the books. Lenders, sponsors, and general counsel are watching a junk-debt selloff and stalled data-center projects that put repayment in question, which points to steady refinancing, workout, and creditor-negotiation work. Fresh data-center construction delays read less as a surprise than as the next step, and they point to more project-finance and energy work.
Selected Press:
A junk-debt rout sparked what the FT called a "bloodbath" for credit investors, with borrowers shifting assets beyond lenders' reach, the drop-down maneuver, adding fuel to the sell-off.
Data-center construction delays are raising repayment questions for debt holders as parts of the AI buildout slip behind schedule.
Pimco said it is being more selective on data-center lending, citing the politics around new projects and a wave of anti-data-center campaigns.
M&A and Dealmaking
Dealmakers kept transacting through the equity sell-off. Carve-outs and cross-border energy deals are generating sell-side, acquisition-finance, and merger-review work, and general counsel are weighing antitrust and foreign-investment exposure on cross-border moves.
Selected Press:
Starbucks forecast a decline in annual revenue as it moves to divest its China business, a carve-out that will need buy-side, financing, and local regulatory work.
Japanese groups launched a roughly $21 billion deal spree to secure gas supplies, with the world's second-largest LNG buyer targeting shale resources on the US Gulf Coast.
Del Monte agreed to buy $285 million of assets from the private entity that licensed it its brand, with general counsel Effie Silva leading the legal and governance strategy.
KMD Brands granted US consumer group Bluestar Alliance exclusivity to complete due diligence on a possible all-share takeover, with a December 23 long-stop date and no certainty of a binding offer.
Regulatory and Government Relations
Policy is cutting two ways for corporate clients: governments are shaping how AI gets built and pouring money into favored sectors, and each creates compliance and advisory work. General counsel and government-relations teams are tracking how fast the rules move and where the subsidies land.
Selected Press:
The UK signaled that "control and sovereignty" will shape its approach to AI, setting principles after debate at the top of government over how to handle a fast-moving technology.
The US critical-minerals push has produced a flurry of government-backed deals but little increase in domestic production, turning billions in federal support into a windfall for Washington lobbyists.
Where the Work Sits
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The clearest new demand sits in the credit behind private equity and the AI buildout. Recent credit scares have tended to begin as funding and refinancing problems rather than credit-quality problems, and this week's junk-debt rout and stalled data-center projects fit that mold, which is why the work runs first through liability-management, workout, and creditor-rights teams rather than through defaults.
Dealmaking is a second source of demand. Starbucks's China carve-out and the Japanese scramble for US gas point to sell-side, acquisition-finance, cross-border, and merger-review mandates, with foreign-investment review in play on the inbound energy work.
Cybersecurity is a third. Fox Rothschild's dismissal and the fallout from the Binance hack keep incident-response, breach-notification, and class-action-defense work flowing for firms and their clients alike.
Policy rounds it out. The UK's AI principles and the US critical-minerals program point to AI-governance, trade, subsidy-compliance, and government-relations mandates as companies position for rules and money that are still being written.
Global Markets
Central banks are signaling they are not finished even as the AI trade wobbles, and clients are reading the backdrop as a reason to lock in funding while they can.
Executives and treasurers are weighing whether a likely December hike closes the financing window, and dealmakers are timing issuance around it. Central banks may be nearing the end of one rate story while the spread of outcomes by sector and balance-sheet quality keeps widening, which is when careful financing advice earns its keep.
Selected Press:
The AI selloff deepened: Intel's guidance miss and Amazon's cash burn handed the Nasdaq its worst day since June; the Nasdaq 100 closed last week about 9% below its peak after Alphabet shed more than $530 billion in market value.
Gold slid to a one-year low below $3,900 an ounce and silver fell under $50 as higher-for-longer rate bets outweighed haven demand.
Fed officials at the Dallas and St. Louis Feds called for at least one or two more hikes; the 10-year Treasury held near 4.9%.
Oil held near $113 a barrel (Brent), with WTI around $104, after fresh Hormuz tanker attacks, and OPEC+ kept its December targets steady; Exxon's profit doubled to $15.4 billion and Chevron's rose about 200% to $9.9 billion on refining margins.
China's factory PMI fell to 49.3, back into contraction, while South Korea's exports jumped 93.7% year-on-year to a record.
Stories to Watch
US midterm elections (Tuesday, November 3) — prediction markets put a Democratic "blue wave" near 70%; control of the Senate will shape the enforcement and regulatory backdrop into 2027.
US October payrolls (Friday) — forecast to more than double to about 65,000 with unemployment near 4.2%, a key input for the Fed's December decision.
US ISM Manufacturing PMI (today) — a read on the factory sector as the tech trade wobbles.
New Zealand election (November 7) — a tight race, with the kiwi already down about 6% since late August.
OPEC+ meeting (November 29) — whether core members unwind the December production hold into 2027 as the Iran war disrupts exports.
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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