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Sidley pulled Legal 500 Hall of Fame tax partner Deborah Paul out of Wachtell to co-lead its New York tax practice, Proskauer hired Goodwin’s Supreme Court and appellate co-head Jaime Santos, and Davis Polk and O’Melveny added New York partners. The lateral market ran hot offshore too, with King & Spalding taking Quinn Emanuel’s Paris arbitration chief and firms racing to build in Mexico.
On the client side, US private credit firms marked down more loans as software borrowers weakened, hyperscalers crowded the euro bond market, and Google avoided a breakup of its ad-tech business. Bond yields caught their breath after a rough week, but the Bank of Japan leaned toward another hike.
Now, on to what matters for your practice today.
Today’s Talking Points
-Sidley lands Wachtell tax co-head Deborah Paul; Proskauer takes Goodwin's SCOTUS chief Jaime Santos
-Davis Polk and O'Melveny add New York partners; King & Spalding grabs Quinn Emanuel's Paris arbitration lead
-Fisher Phillips and Ogletree expand in Mexico as the lateral market spreads offshore
-US private credit firms mark down more loans as software borrowers weaken and non-accruals climb
-Hyperscalers crowd the euro bond market; Asian banks hit data-center lending limits
-Google avoids an ad-tech breakup; Elliott targets Air Liquide and opposes T-Mobile's ~$200bn Deutsche Telekom merger
-Bond yields steady after a rough week; BOJ leans toward a hike and the ECB decides next week
-Proofpoint eyes Varonis and KKR buys A1 Garage as sponsors keep deploying
Talent Strategy
Latest Moves
Sidley hired Legal 500 Hall of Fame tax partner Deborah Paul from Wachtell to co-lead its New York tax practice — the latest in a run of Wachtell departures.
Proskauer hired Jaime Santos, co-head of Goodwin's Supreme Court and appellate practice.
Davis Polk added M&A partner Todd Kornreich in New York, and O'Melveny added bankruptcy and restructuring partner David Botter in New York.
King & Spalding hired international arbitration partner Thomas Voisin from Quinn Emanuel in Paris; Isabelle Michou now leads Quinn Emanuel's Paris office.
Norton Rose Fulbright hired Jason Stiehl, Crowell & Moring's former Chicago office managing partner, into a competitive Chicago market.
Holland & Hart added tax partner Michael Farrell in Salt Lake City, and Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck hired former DHS communications official Christopher Hull in public affairs.
Simpson Thacher extended its raid on Weil, adding partners in London and New York, including a co-head of Weil's US private funds practice.
What today's moves tell us: The lateral market stayed hot at the top and pushed further offshore, into Paris and Mexico, with tax, appellate, and restructuring talent changing hands and Wachtell losing another marquee partner.
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Operations and Strategy
US firms are planting flags in Mexico as nearshoring pulls labor and employment work south, even as AI keeps pressure on how firms bill.
Fisher Phillips added a 10-lawyer team in Mexico City, lifting its Mexican headcount to 37 and making it one of the country's largest labor and employment practices by headcount. Ogletree Deakins opened a second Mexican office in Monterrey with nine lawyers, including three partners from Littler Mendelson, near the Texas border. Both moves track manufacturing and supply-chain investment into northern Mexico, where employment and industrial-relations work is growing.
The billing debate has not cooled. Bloomberg Law framed the AI era as a mystery for the billable hour, a week after Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Citi pressed firms to pass on AI efficiency gains. The question firms still have not answered is how they get paid as the hours needed for routine work shrink but the value of the advice does not.
Practices
Antitrust and Regulatory
Regulators handed dealmakers a friendlier read this week. General counsel and boards are watching remedies, not breakups, become the default outcome, a signal that supports deal certainty even as activists reopen merger fights.
Selected Press:
Google avoided a breakup of its dominant ad-tech business, a remedy-driven outcome that leaves the unit intact.
Elliott built a stake in Deutsche Telekom and is opposing its roughly $200bn merger with T-Mobile US, setting up an activist and antitrust fight.
The White House backed OpenAI in its copyright dispute with publishers, and OpenAI said it is building automated shutdown capabilities for its AI tools.
M&A and Activism
Sponsors and activists kept deploying. Dealmakers are pairing take-outs with balance-sheet campaigns, a pipeline that points to sell-side, financing, and shareholder-engagement mandates across sectors.
Selected Press:
Elliott built a stake in Air Liquide, pressing the French industrial-gas group on margins and capital returns versus Linde ahead of an October capital-markets day.
Thoma Bravo-backed Proofpoint is in talks to buy listed peer Varonis Systems for about $4.7bn.
KKR agreed to buy A1 Garage Door Service for $2bn; Lottomatica agreed to buy Spain’s Cirsa for $3.2bn; and Vertiv will buy Utility Innovation Group for up to $2.6bn.
Shell agreed to take stakes in two BP exploration projects in the Gulf of America and Brazil.
Private Credit and Capital Markets
Private-credit stress is showing up in the marks. Fund managers and lenders are watching software borrowers weaken and non-accruals rise, and that stress tends to surface first as amendment and liability-management work, extending maturities, resetting covenants, and negotiating with a concentrated lender group, long before it reaches a courtroom. The AI build-out is straining bond and bank capacity at the same time, pushing borrowers toward more bespoke structures.
Selected Press:
US private credit firms marked down more loans, with business-development companies holding portfolios below cost through Q2 and non-accruals rising to about 3.4% of cost from 2.5%, concentrated in software.
US hyperscalers are crowding the euro bond market, with Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft issuing euro debt to fund AI; the ECB warned heavier supply could lift funding costs and displace other borrowers.
Asian banks are hitting data-center lending limits, with AI borrowing near $29bn since early last year and a record $15bn in 2026, and some banks looking to offload exposure.
Waymo is in advanced talks for a debut $3bn debt raise from PIMCO, Blackstone, and Sixth Street.
Where the Work Sits
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The lateral wave keeps feeding recruitment, conflicts, and client-transition work, and Wachtell's continued partner losses add a firm-governance and retention layer. Tax, appellate, and restructuring hires point to where firms expect the next mandates: complex planning, high-stakes appeals, and workouts.
The market has seen this sequence before: when long rates jump and lenders start marking books down, work moves toward refinancing, amendments, and creditor negotiations well ahead of any spike in defaults. This quarter's BDC markdowns and rising non-accruals, concentrated in software, point straight at liability-management, direct-lending, and special-situations teams.
The AI build-out is turning into a financing problem as much as a power problem. Hyperscaler euro issuance, strained Asian bank balance sheets, and debut debt raises like Waymo's put a premium on capital-markets, project-finance, and bank-regulatory lawyers who can structure around capacity limits.
Remedy-driven outcomes like Google's keep antitrust and merger-control teams central to deal certainty, while activist campaigns at Air Liquide and against the T-Mobile–Deutsche Telekom merger open shareholder-engagement, defense, and merger-litigation mandates.
Global Markets
Rates still dominate the client conversation. Dealmakers got a brief reprieve as yields eased and US stocks snapped a three-day slide, but the direction of travel is still higher. Clients are weighing financing windows as the Bank of Japan leans toward another hike, the ECB decides next week, and softening US jobs data complicates the Fed's path. Boards with energy exposure are tracking European gas at multi-year highs.
Selected Press:
Bond yields caught their breath: US stocks snapped a three-day losing streak and long yields eased, though Australia's 10-year hit 5.25%, a level unseen since 2011, and markets price September hikes from four major central banks.
The Bank of Japan is leaning toward a quarter-point hike this month, with data showing no major yen intervention.
US private payrolls rose just 38,000 in August, a seven-month low, and factory activity slowed as the ISM index fell to 54.6; the August jobs report lands Friday.
European natural gas hit its highest since 2023, and US gas prices set an August record at $4.07 a gallon.
Stories to Watch
US Non-Farm Payrolls (Fri, Sept 4) — after a soft ADP reading, a key input to the Fed's September decision.
ISM Services (Thu) — a read on the larger services economy after factory growth slowed.
ECB rate decision (next week) — markets watch the path and speculation over Lagarde's future.
Fed FOMC (Sept 16-17) and the Bank of Japan this month — two live hike decisions.
Governor Newsom's decision on California AB 2305 — a potential bar on outside capital in law firms.
Earnings: Broadcom and HPE (both flagged strong AI demand), lululemon and DocuSign (Thu), Oracle (Fri) — reads on AI and enterprise spend.
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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