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Linklaters recruited longtime Wachtell Lipton M&A partner Mark Gordon as its Americas managing partner and global M&A co-chair, another marquee exit from Wachtell’s ranks. Womble Bond Dickinson pulled a 29-person auto-defense group from Lewis Brisbois, Fennemore and Gallagher & Kennedy agreed to merge into an 800-lawyer firm, and NALP data show the largest firms cut graduate hiring for the first time since 2011.
On the client side, private-credit stress is deepening: redemptions at Blackstone’s private credit fund sit near 10% and defaults are rising, even as Dell raised $5bn and US companies flooded European bond markets. Dow is weighing an exit from its $20bn Saudi chemicals venture, and Enbridge is buying Tallgrass’s crude business from Blackstone. Oil pushed past $101, Bessent’s bigger bond buyback backfired as 10-year yields hit a three-year high, and the ECB is expected to hike today.
Now, on to what matters for your practice today.
Today’s Talking Points
-Linklaters takes Wachtell M&A veteran Mark Gordon as Americas MP; Wachtell departures keep coming
-Enforcement and capital-markets benches in demand: Steptoe, S&C, Milbank, Freshfields, Akin, Willkie all add partners
-Womble grabs a 29-lawyer auto-defense team from Lewis Brisbois; Littler takes a Jackson Lewis Puerto Rico group
-Big Law graduate hiring falls for the first time since 2011 as firms weigh AI; Fennemore and Gallagher & Kennedy merge
-Private-credit stress turns into a workout story: Blackstone BDC redemptions near 10%, defaults hit 6%, Blue Owl’s Loparex loans wiped out
-Debt rush: Dell raises $5bn, US firms set a record for European bond sales, and a Treasury rate spiral gathers pace
-M&A carve-outs multiply: Dow eyes a $20bn Saudi JV exit, BP’s North Sea draws suitors, Enbridge buys Tallgrass crude
-Oil tops $101; Bessent’s buyback backfires as 10-year yields hit 4.85%; ECB decides today
Talent Strategy
Latest Moves
Linklaters hired Wachtell Lipton M&A partner Mark Gordon as Americas managing partner and global M&A co-chair.
Milbank recruited distressed-finance partner Luke Charleston from Akin Gump into its alternative investments practice in New York.
Freshfields added M&A partner Bethany Pfalzgraf in New York.
Sullivan & Cromwell hired capital markets partner Joze Vranicar in New York.
Steptoe brought on Della Sentilles from Morgan Stanley for its investigations, white-collar and compliance group in New York.
Akin rehired corporate partner Kimberly Rowe from Walt Disney in Los Angeles.
Willkie rehired litigator Sean Sandoloski, a former Kavanaugh clerk, in Washington.
Womble Bond Dickinson lifted a 29-person auto-defense group from Lewis Brisbois that handles 2,500-plus matters for Nissan, Ford, and GM, pushing its mass-torts bench past 100 attorneys.
Littler Mendelson took an eight-lawyer team, including the managing principal, from Jackson Lewis in Puerto Rico.
What today's moves tell us: firms are paying up for M&A leadership and enforcement credibility while consolidating litigation benches through team lifts. The Linklaters hire shows a US firm buying instant M&A brand rather than building it, and Wachtell keeps supplying the talent.
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Operations and Strategy
Firms are managing two pressures at once: a softer entry-level market and rising costs that keep pushing smaller firms to combine.
The largest firms hired fewer law graduates last year for the first time since 2011, down 7.5% from the 2024 peak, according to NALP. Past hiring peaks have been followed by dips that bottom out about three years later, but this one arrives without a recession; firms instead point to uncertainty over how AI will reshape first-year staffing. The open question is how deep and for how long the cuts to entry classes go.
Fennemore and Gallagher & Kennedy plan to merge in early December under the Fennemore name, lifting Fennemore's lawyer count from 375 to about 425 and creating a platform of more than 800 lawyers and professionals, with a new Santa Fe office. It continues Fennemore's run of tie-ups across Texas, Denver, Seattle, and San Diego. In a market with modest demand growth and rising costs to run these businesses, more mid-market consolidation is the natural result.
Womble's team grab from Lewis Brisbois shows the same logic at the practice level: firms are buying intact, revenue-generating groups rather than waiting to build them.
Practices
Capital Markets and Private Credit
Borrowers are racing to lock funding before rates climb as the strain is showing on both sides of the credit market. Treasurers and sponsors are pulling issuance forward while private-credit lenders confront redemptions and rising defaults, which is turning growth-era portfolios into workout files. For lenders and their counsel, the near-term risk looks more like a funding-and-redemption problem than a pure credit-quality one, and that is where liability-management, creditor-rights, and special-situations mandates begin.
Selected Press:
Blackstone's private credit fund is seeing redemptions near 10% of shares as Fitch's broad default measure rose to 6% from 5%, and Blue Owl's Loparex loans fell from near par to close to zero on the "SaaSpocalypse" thesis that AI will undercut software borrowers.
Private credit funded 82% of 2026 buyouts, up from 61% in 2019; with a maturity wall ahead, Deutsche Bank notes over 80% of B-rated debt sits in floating-rate loans or private credit.
Dell raised $5bn in investment-grade bonds against roughly $23bn of orders to refinance debt and fund AI-server growth.
US companies set a record for European bond sales — Amazon, Uber, and other issuers have sold about €149bn there this year as AI borrowing congests the US market.
A Treasury rate spiral is building, with dealer option-hedging and mortgage-convexity flows pushing long-dated yields and swap spreads higher.
Private Equity and M&A
Sponsors and strategics are moving on carve-outs, energy assets, and roll-ups, and the deal mix points to sell-side, financing, and diligence work rather than passive holding. Dealmakers are treating portfolio reshaping as offense: shedding non-core stakes to fund higher-conviction bets.
Selected Press:
Dow is weighing an exit from its 35% stake in the $20bn Sadara chemicals venture with Saudi Aramco, part of a broader portfolio reshaping.
Enbridge agreed to buy Tallgrass's crude-oil business, including most of the Pony Express Pipeline, from Blackstone for $2.6bn.
BP's North Sea operations drew suitors including Adura, NEO Next+, Harbour Energy, and Serica, in a package that could fetch around $2.7bn.
Independence Realty Trust and Centerspace will merge into an apartment REIT worth about $8.1bn including debt; Analog Devices will buy Alif Semiconductor for $1.35bn.
Salesforce is in talks to buy AI market-research startup Listen Labs for as much as $2bn; CD&R added former Bristol Myers CEO Giovanni Caforio to source healthcare deals.
Antitrust, Regulatory and Legal AI
Enforcement outcomes are cutting both ways for corporate clients: a hard EU line on old deals sits alongside a lighter US touch on fund rules, while legal AI keeps drawing capital. General counsel are watching how regulators price execution risk before committing to structurally complex transactions.
Selected Press:
Booking Holdings lost its challenge to the EU's veto of its $1.9bn eTraveli acquisition, a reminder that Brussels will still block deals on foreclosure theories.
The SEC moved to scrap its pay-to-play rule that limits private-equity firms' dealings with public pension officials, easing a long-standing compliance constraint.
Harvey raised $550m at a $15bn valuation, co-led by Lightspeed and Diffusion, as legal-AI spending keeps climbing.
Where the Work Sits
***
Private-credit stress is arriving as a funding-and-workout problem, not only a credit-quality one. Blackstone's redemptions, rising defaults, and the Loparex wipeout point to liability-management, creditor-rights, and special-situations mandates, and as returns depend more on structuring and workout skill than on spread, that solutions-driven work concentrates in a smaller set of restructuring and finance teams.
The debt rush keeps capital-markets and finance desks busy. Dell's AI-server bond and the record wave of US issuance in Europe are ways to route capital to the same constrained buildout, and the strain in Treasury plumbing adds hedging, disclosure, and derivatives work on top of straight underwriting.
Deal execution is shifting back toward carve-outs and energy transactions. Dow's Saudi exit, Enbridge's Tallgrass purchase, and the BP North Sea auction generate cross-border M&A, project-finance, and antitrust diligence, and the Booking defeat is a reminder that merger-control strategy still decides which deals close.
Global Markets
The macro backdrop is tightening from energy, trade, and rates at once.
Clients are now positioning for higher-for-longer. Treasurers are weighing whether to pull issuance forward before next week's Fed meeting, energy-exposed boards are re-running cost scenarios as oil clears $101, and companies with Canadian supply chains are mapping exposure to a new round of US import bans. Decision-makers are also watching whether official jawboning can move the yen and yields, given how markets have brushed it aside. Recent cycles are a caution here: when policymakers fight fundamentals without them, the market usually calls the bluff.
Selected Press:
Bessent's doubled $6bn bond buyback backfired as 10-year Treasury yields rose to a three-year high of 4.85%, extending a two-week selloff.
Brent topped $101 after Iran said it is ready for a more intense war with the US.
The ECB is expected to hike today as the Iran war fans inflation, while Turkey held rates steady.
The US will ban some Canadian alcohol, dairy, and motorbikes from Sept. 29 after Canada's CA$27.6bn tariffs; Trump also pledged a $5,000 "dividend" if Republicans win the midterms.
The BIS warned the AI arms race still poses a global-stability risk, flagging the odds of a bust.
Stories to Watch
Oracle earnings (tonight) — first major cloud/AI bellwether of the quarter; guidance on enterprise AI spending will set the tone for tech-adjacent deal flow.
US CPI (Wednesday) — core inflation expected at 3.1%; a miss in either direction resets the Fed calculus and reprices credit markets.
FOMC decision (Wednesday) — rates likely held, but dot-plot shifts could move duration trades and leveraged-finance spreads.
Bank of Japan policy meeting (Thursday) — any hawkish tilt strengthens the yen, pressures carry trades, and ripples through cross-border M&A financing.
Hong Kong's Five-Year Plan draft (Friday) — signals Beijing's next regulatory posture toward foreign capital and cross-border data flows.
Anthropic's reported IPO timeline — if confirmed, sets valuation benchmarks for the entire AI sector and opens a wave of late-stage venture exits.
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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