Good afternoon,
The lateral and results tape is busy. Greenberg Traurig, Womble Bond Dickinson and Proskauer booked partners, Debevoise & Plimpton reshuffled its real estate leadership, and Dentons' UK arm grew 10% while Withers' profit per partner jumped 26%. King & Spalding has now billed more than $42 million advising Saudi Arabia on a US nuclear deal.
On the client side, the AI buildout is turning into a financing machine. Blue Owl's Stack is chasing a $5.9 billion data-center loan, banks are lining up $15 billion for an Anthropic campus, and CoreWeave sweetened terms to sell AI-linked debt. Under the surface, private credit is straining: Fitch put default rates at a record 6%. BP put its North Sea business up for sale, and markets whipsawed after the Fed.
Now, on to what matters for your practice today.
Today’s Talking Points
-Greenberg Traurig, Womble and Proskauer add partners; Debevoise reshuffles real estate leadership
-Dentons UK +10%, Withers PEP +26%; King & Spalding billed $42m on the Saudi nuclear deal
-Blue Owl's Stack seeks $5.9bn, banks weigh $15bn for Anthropic, CoreWeave concedes on AI debt
-Fitch default rate hits a record 6%; regulators flag KKR/Apollo 'circular' risk; Ares raises $12.9bn
-BP markets its North Sea business; HSBC sells a $25bn Australian loan book to Blackstone; PE floods into Asia
-Texas SB 17 rules complicate data-center deals; European banks hedge AI exposure
-Stocks rebound after the Fed as an AI hedge fund blows up, Japan intervenes on the yen, China's PMI slips into contraction
Talent Strategy
Latest Moves
Greenberg Traurig hired construction-law shareholder William Shaughnessy in Atlanta from Jones Walker.
Womble Bond Dickinson added private-capital partner Paula Myers in Leeds from Irwin Mitchell.
Debevoise & Plimpton elevated Edward Rishty to chair its New York real estate practice, moved Peter Irwin into the general counsel role as Chris Tahbaz retires, and hired TPG Real Estate Credit senior adviser Daniel Kasell as a partner.
Proskauer brought on former NFL general counsel Jeff Pash into its sports practice.
Former Purdue bankruptcy judge Robert Drain left Skadden for advisory firm M3 Partners.
What today's moves tell us: hiring is strong across private capital, real estate credit and specialized regulatory work, the practices tied to the data-center and sponsor cycle.
Operations and Strategy
UK and global firms are posting solid revenue with uneven profit, and firm economics increasingly track the AI and sponsor cycle.
Dentons' UK, Ireland and Middle East arm grew revenue 10% to £336 million, led by restructuring, regulatory, investigations and banking work, and has grown more than 50% since Paul Jarvis became CEO in 2021. Withers lifted profit per equity partner 26.2% to £903,000 on a 10% revenue rise. Firm leaders also pointed to double-digit or high single-digit gains at CMS, Norton Rose Fulbright, Linklaters, Clifford Chance, HSF Kramer and Travers Smith. The pattern is topline growth without matching profit gains, which keeps pressure on billing rates and lateral pay.
Sovereign and regulatory mandates remain a real fee pool. King & Spalding has collected more than $42 million since 2018 advising Saudi Arabia on its civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with the US, per FARA filings, with Hunton Andrews Kurth among other advisers on the deal.
Practices
Banking, Finance and Private Credit
Lenders and sponsors are leaning hard into AI-infrastructure debt even as private credit shows strain, which points general counsel, fund managers and finance partners toward heavy financing, structuring and, increasingly, workout matters. The near-term risk in private credit is often less about any single borrower than about funding and redemption dynamics, and today's data suggests both the deployment and the stress are building at once.
Selected Press:
Blue Owl's Stack Infrastructure is seeking an A$8.5bn ($5.9bn) syndicated loan for a third Melbourne data center, while Blue Owl weighs a $30bn asset sale across Australia, Japan and Malaysia.
Banks led by Morgan Stanley are weighing a $15bn loan for a Google-backed Anthropic data center in Hubbard, Texas, with Evercore advising.
CoreWeave raised yields to about 9.1% and added a lockbox on a $2.6bn term loan tied to Anthropic after weak demand.
European banks including SocGen, BBVA, ING and BNP Paribas are courting AI lending while hedging it; SocGen used a ~$5bn synthetic risk transfer against €7.7bn of data-center exposure.
Ares pulled in $12.9bn of credit commitments, its biggest in three years, even as retail redemptions stay capped.
Fitch put the private-credit default rate at a record 6%, led by industrials at 10.4% and healthcare at 9.4%.
US insurance regulators flagged 'circular' risk in the multi-asset securitizations used by KKR and Apollo.
M&A, Private Equity and Capital Markets
Sponsors are deploying at scale in Asia while buyers circle carve-outs and loan books, keeping sell-side, financing and fund-formation work steady even with public markets choppy. Dealmakers and boards are treating portfolio simplification as the trigger for the next wave of mandates.
Selected Press:
BP launched a formal sale of its UK North Sea business, valued around $2.6bn, as part of a $20bn asset-sale plan under CEO Meg O'Neill; Neo Next+ and Ithaca Energy are seen as buyers.
HSBC agreed to sell its $25.3bn Australian mortgage and personal-loan book to Blackstone funds.
PE firms are raising record sums in Asia, concentrated in EQT, Bain and Blackstone; EQT is pursuing Kakaku.com after its Fujitec take-private.
Westinghouse confidentially filed for an IPO, joining nuclear names chasing capital on AI-driven power demand.
Jersey Mike's priced its IPO at $23 and Reformation at $15, testing the consumer listing window.
Tesla is weighing a separation of its China unit to clear a path for a SpaceX merger; Musk denied it.
Regulatory, Trade and Technology
Data-center growth is colliding with foreign-ownership rules, export politics and AI-security failures, which routes work to export-controls, cybersecurity and governance teams. Boards are now treating these as deal-gating risks rather than back-office matters.
Selected Press:
Texas SB 17 restrictions on foreign 'adversarial' property could sweep in data-center service agreements, colocation, GPU-as-a-service and syndicated-loan structures.
Anthropic disclosed that its Claude models accessed the internet and breached three organizations during internal cyber tests.
US senators warned Apple against buying memory chips from Chinese suppliers.
New York sued prediction-market operator Kalshi.
Where the Work Sits
***
One of the deepest fee pools is in AI-infrastructure financing. The Blue Owl, Anthropic and CoreWeave deals point to syndicated and private-credit lending, collateral and security structuring, and foreign-ownership compliance around data centers, especially under Texas SB 17. That work sits with finance, projects and real estate credit teams.
Private credit strain steers work toward special situations. With Fitch's default rate at a record 6% and regulators probing KKR and Apollo structures, amend-and-extend talks, liability management and fund-liquidity matters tend to start well before any name shows open stress.
Sponsor M&A and carve-outs keep deal and antitrust teams busy. BP's North Sea sale, HSBC's loan-book disposal and the surge of private-equity capital into Asia each carry M&A, financing, regulatory and fund-formation work, much of it cross-border.
Regulatory and cyber complexity is its own fee pool. AI-security failures, export politics around Chinese chips, and governance scrutiny generate investigations, data-security and board-advisory mandates that cut across corporate, regulatory and litigation groups.
Global Markets
Clients are resetting financing math after a turbulent week. Executives are weighing tighter conditions as an AI-driven rout gave way to a sharp rebound, while dealmakers and traders watch a hedge-fund blowup, a rare Japanese yen intervention, and a fresh China contraction for signals on risk appetite and deployment.
Selected Press:
US stocks rebounded, with the Nasdaq up 2.8% and the Dow up 614, snapping a six-day slide after the Fed's dovish turn; US hedge funds still face a record monthly loss.
Situational Awareness, Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI hedge fund, blew up, down about 67% for the month, and Citadel agreed to buy its holdings.
Japan intervened to support the yen as the BOJ held at 1.0% but signaled faster hikes.
China's manufacturing PMI fell to 49.2, back in contraction, and the CSI 300 posted its worst month since 2016.
US 30-year mortgage rates hit a one-year high of 6.66%, and eurozone inflation ticked up to 2.9%.
Stories to Watch
Amazon and Apple earnings — whether Amazon's $220bn AI capex and Apple's soft hardware guidance reset the AI-spend debate.
Long-end Treasury selloff and 1-year-high mortgage rates — refinancing and liability-management triggers for clients.
BP's North Sea sale process — buyer interest and the UK tax and regulatory debate that follows.
Private-credit stress after Fitch's record 6% default rate — watch redemption gates and rating-agency scrutiny.
Japan's yen intervention and China's PMI contraction — cross-border and supply-chain exposure for clients.
Trump's reported phased Gaza deal — unconfirmed, but a potential shift in Middle East risk.
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 newsletters that highlight the drivers of demand for legal services.
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