Good afternoon,
Private equity wants into the business of law. Massumi + Consoli's founders say their private-equity-backed management-services structure can pay partners in equity tied to future liquidity events, and larger firms are studying the idea. The lateral market keeps churning, with Mayer Brown, Gibson Dunn and Greenberg adding finance partners and Cooley hiring a House GOP lawyer to build a congressional-investigations bench. Weil is still losing rainmakers, with M&A partner Michael Aiello heading to Cravath.
On the client side, bond yields broke higher: the US 10-year topped 5% and the two-year cleared 4.9%, even as business activity hit a five-year high and CFOs raised their inflation forecasts. BlackRock and IFM neared a $25bn Asia data-center deal, and Blackstone is building a hybrid private-credit CLO.
Now, on to what matters for your practice today.
Today’s Talking Points
-Massumi + Consoli pitches PE-backed partner pay as Mayer Brown, Gibson Dunn and Greenberg add finance partners
-Cooley hires a House GOP lawyer for Hill investigations; Weil's Michael Aiello leaves for Cravath
-Bradley and Ropes & Gray deepen AI tooling; Ashurst Perkins Coie and White and Williams expand offices
-US 10-year yield breaks 5%; PMI hits a five-year high and CFOs lift inflation forecasts
-BlackRock and IFM near a $25bn Stack data-center deal; JPMorgan sees $2.5tn of M&A, up 35%
-Blackstone builds a hybrid private-credit CLO as Apollo caps fund redemptions a third quarter
-Thames Water creditors inject $1.3bn to avoid UK control; DOJ moves to speed antitrust probes
-Jana pushes Six Flags toward a sale; the Arnault family reshuffles LVMH's holding structure
Talent Strategy
Latest Moves
Mayer Brown hired leveraged finance and private capital partner Kerrick Seay in New York.
Gibson Dunn and Greenberg Traurig also added finance partners, part of a broader run of lateral hiring for lending and restructuring talent.
Troutman Pepper Locke hired private equity and investment funds partner Reed Balmer from Finn Dixon & Herling in Stamford.
Cooley hired an attorney for House Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee to build its congressional-investigations practice in Washington ahead of the midterms.
Alston & Bird added FTC consumer-protection veteran Sandhya Brown to its litigation and trial group in Washington.
Holland & Knight hired national-security and government-affairs specialist Ike Blanton in Washington, and Nixon Peabody added healthcare litigator Jeremy Avila as counsel in San Francisco.
Whistleblower Law Collaborative took former DOJ healthcare-fraud lawyer Augustine Ripa for its False Claims Act practice in Boston.
What today's moves tell us: firms are paying up for finance, private-equity and investigations talent. Leveraged-finance and private-credit specialists are in particular demand, and Washington investigations benches are building ahead of the midterms.
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
Outside capital, office expansion and AI tooling are reshaping how firms plan to grow and how they pay.
Massumi + Consoli's founders argue their private-equity-backed management-services structure can recruit and keep partners by offering equity tied to future liquidity events rather than ever-larger cash guarantees. The model separates legal advice from the firm's business assets, letting outside owners hold the latter. Larger firms are weighing similar structures, though questions about culture, economics and partner buy-in remain, and several states, California most recently, have moved to limit outside ownership.
Weil Gotshal is still losing rainmakers, with M&A partner Michael Aiello leaving for Cravath and another funds partner heading to Simpson Thacher. Legal Business counts nearly a quarter of Weil's London partnership gone since January as Ramona Nee weighs a turnaround.
Firms elsewhere are planting flags. Ashurst Perkins Coie is aligning its enlarged Paris office with a three-sector global strategy after its June merger, and White and Williams opened in Washington, its 10th office, with a six-lawyer insurance-defense team from the dissolving Jackson & Campbell. Norton Rose Fulbright named new leaders for its growing Dallas office.
AI tooling is becoming table stakes. Bradley rolled out Legora's platform to more than 1,200 lawyers and staff, and Ropes & Gray built a proprietary diligence tool with OpenAI to bake its own workflows into review. Bloomberg Law data on the small class of 2011 offers a preview of hiring: the largest firms are increasingly comfortable taking smaller classes and filling gaps later from government and smaller rivals, a pattern likely to deepen as AI reshapes headcount.
Practices
Private Capital and Credit
Private credit is scaling and straining at once. Managers are engineering new structures to keep deploying while redemption pressure builds, and fund managers, sponsors and their lenders are leaning on counsel to document bespoke vehicles and manage liquidity, work that flows to funds, finance and structured-credit teams.
Selected Press:
Blackstone is building a hybrid CLO that can hold both broadly syndicated loans and private-credit assets, a structure that raises information-barrier, trading and licensing questions.
Apollo capped withdrawals from a private-credit fund for a third straight quarter after 14.7% of investors sought to exit.
Private-credit firms are angling to finance part of JPMorgan's card business, another push into bank territory.
Twin Bridge is raising $600m for a debut PE secondaries fund, and Trump Jr.'s 1789 Capital raised $2bn toward a $3bn growth fund.
M&A and Deals
Dealmaking is running hot. JPMorgan's M&A head says boards feel they cannot stand still, and contested bids, carve-outs and family-holding fights are keeping deal, antitrust and governance lawyers busy for the dealmaking elite.
Selected Press:
JPMorgan's Charlie Bouckaert put 2026 M&A at about $2.5tn, up roughly 35% year on year and nearly 60% in tech, and expects software consolidation to build into 2027.
WSP Global walked from a $6.3bn bid for Arcadis, and Australia blocked IAG's $960m purchase of RAC Insurance on competition grounds.
Jana Partners pushed Six Flags to explore a sale, and the Arnault family will merge holding company Agache into Christian Dior to simplify LVMH's structure.
Sixth Street revived a bid for insurer Brighthouse as a rival Aquarian deal stays under Delaware review.
Capital Markets and Financing
The listing pipeline is testing a jumpy market. Some issuers are pressing ahead while others wait for Anthropic's debut, and sponsors, CFOs and treasurers are timing offerings around volatile rates, feeding capital-markets and financing desks.
Selected Press:
Airtel Money filed for a London IPO expected to raise at least $800m, potentially the city's biggest listing in five years.
CVC-backed Bamboo Insurance and Holtec Nuclear postponed IPOs, citing conditions, as the market waits on Anthropic.
Peloton is marketing an $800m debut junk-bond sale, and Australia's Firmus is seeking $10bn to buy Nvidia chips ahead of a $5bn IPO.
Novo Nordisk is open to a US direct listing, and China's CanSemi is seeking $919m in a Shenzhen IPO.
Restructuring and Regulatory
Distress and enforcement are both building. Creditors are writing checks to avoid nationalization, and a faster antitrust process changes deal timelines, pointing to workout, creditor-rights and merger-review mandates.
Selected Press:
Thames Water creditors including Elliott, Silver Point and Farallon will write off debt and inject another $1.3bn to avoid a UK special administration.
Lone Star may hand Italian coffee-machine maker Evoca to creditors including Carlyle and Park Square.
The DOJ moved to speed its antitrust probes, a shift with direct consequences for merger timelines.
A Morgan Stanley banker accidentally emailed clients an internal list of 100-plus pending deals, mostly in Asia, raising confidentiality and reputational exposure.
Where the Work Sits
***
Recent credit scares have tended to start as funding and redemption problems rather than credit-quality blowups, and today's mix, Apollo's third straight redemption cap, Blackstone's hybrid CLO, and private lenders pushing into bank turf, fits that pattern, sending high-end matters to funds, structured-credit and workout teams first.
Yields breaking 5% pull the next tranche of work. Refinancings at these levels tip toward liability management and creditor rights, and Thames Water's creditor rescue and Lone Star's Evoca handover point to more restructuring and special-situations mandates for New York and London desks.
Deal and governance work is broad and deep. A $2.5tn M&A market, the BlackRock-IFM data-center bid, contested deals like Six Flags and Brighthouse, and the Arnault-LVMH reshuffle drive M&A, antitrust and corporate-governance mandates, and a faster DOJ antitrust process raises the premium on early merger-review strategy. Sophisticated counsel now build antitrust and financing risk into the deal thesis from day one rather than retrofitting a narrative after signing.
Data, AI and investigations round out the sheet. The Morgan Stanley leak, China's probe of DeepSeek and Moonshot over data routing, and disputes over AI-generated court filings feed cybersecurity, privacy and professional-responsibility work, while Cooley's Washington hire signals demand for congressional-investigations defense ahead of the midterms.
Global Markets
Rates just broke higher. Executives and treasurers are repricing an environment where the US 10-year topped 5% and the two-year cleared 4.9%, and the dollar hit an eight-week high. The rich world's debt math is tightening at the same time, and CFOs must weigh whether to pull financing forward before costs climb further, while sponsors watch oil swing back above $100.
Selected Press:
The US 10-year yield topped 5% and the two-year cleared 4.9%, both multi-year highs, as markets priced a 53% chance of another Fed hike next month.
S&P Global's composite PMI hit 58.4 a five-year high, with input prices at their highest since 2022; CFOs lifted inflation expectations to 5.3% this year.
The Economist flagged rich-world debt near 110% of GDP and US interest costs potentially tripling to $2.7tn by decade's end.
Oil rebounded above $100 on Saudi pipeline repairs and Strait of Hormuz uncertainty, and the 30-year mortgage rate hit 7.12%.
Stories to Watch
Costco and Darden earnings (today, Sept. 24) - consumer-demand reads as rates stay elevated.
Durable Goods Orders (Friday, Sept. 25) - a fresh gauge of capex appetite against 5% yields.
ADARx Pharmaceuticals IPO (Friday, Sept. 25) - a test of biotech listing appetite.
Anthropic's IPO debut - recent IPO postponements cite the wait for it directly.
Trump-Xi summit and UN General Assembly (this week) - trade, AI and Iran in focus; the US signaled openness to extending the China truce.
Texas data-center permit audit - Governor Abbott's pause is an early sign of siting and permitting risk for the AI buildout.
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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