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Weil Gotshal & Manges’ wind-down has turned into a market of its own. Kirkland & Ellis is in advanced talks to hire Ramona Nee, the private equity partner once lined up to run Weil, and Crosby, a two-year-old AI law firm, is bidding for pieces of the firm in a test of what a dissolving partnership’s data and systems are worth. Nearly 600 associates are now job-hunting, even as Winston Taylor matched Milbank’s latest associate pay rise.
On the client side, dealmakers kept transacting through the selloff. Marvell’s $115 billion all-stock move for Lumentum put a price on AI connectivity, Oracle filed to raise $20 billion for its buildout, and Anthropic disclosed $895 billion in compute commitments ahead of its IPO. Oil fell about 8% after Iran’s supreme leader cleared talks with Washington, pulling Treasury yields and inflation fears lower on the eve of Tuesday’s US midterms.
Now, on to what matters for your practice today.
Today’s Talking Points
-Weil’s wind-down spawns a lateral and asset scramble — Kirkland courts Nee, Crosby bids for the firm’s pieces
-Winston Taylor matches Milbank on associate pay; Silicon Valley partners outearn New York
-Four Canadian firms including Bennett Jones, BLG, McCarthy Tétrault, Davies Ward hit in a Toronto breach wave
-Marvell’s $115B Lumentum deal and Oracle’s $20B raise keep AI dealmaking alive through the selloff
-OpenAI trims its round to $20B at a lower $1.25T; Anthropic books an operating loss on $895B of compute
-Activists circle — Oasis pushes Vail Resorts, Fund 1 bids for Xponential Fitness
-Oil drops ~8% on Iran talks; gold rebounds and the 10-year eases toward 4.9%
-Events to Watch: Tuesday’s US midterms, Friday payrolls, and the RBA and BoE rate calls
Talent Strategy
Latest Moves
Kirkland & Ellis is in advanced talks to hire Ramona Nee, the private equity partner once lined up to lead Weil Gotshal & Manges, as she looks to bring a group across from the dissolving firm.
Weil Gotshal private equity partner Lewis Blakey is set to join Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in London.
Kennedys is combining with Cunningham Swaim, a 14-lawyer Dallas aviation trial boutique that defended the helicopter operators sued over the crash that killed Kobe Bryant.
Nearly 600 Weil associates are on the market, and the firm has apologized to incoming junior lawyers and pledged to help them find new places to land.
What today’s moves tell us: the reallocation of Weil’s partners is giving way to a fight over its clients, its associates, and even its infrastructure, while rivals keep paying up to hold junior talent.
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 competing on pay and on what a collapsing rival leaves behind.
Winston Taylor matched Milbank’s associate salary increases, the latest firm to move in lockstep on the Cravath scale; a raise at the top is a fixed cost the whole market has to absorb. Silicon Valley partners, meanwhile, outearned their New York counterparts for the first time, averaging $2.57 million amid an AI-driven boom.
The more unusual contest is over Weil’s remains. Crosby, a two-year-old firm built around AI, is bidding to buy pieces of Weil as it shuts down, a deal that would test what a dissolving partnership’s data and workflows are actually worth. At roughly $2.1 billion in revenue, Weil is the largest firm by revenue to wind down in modern Big Law, and with no bank debt its partners face a cleaner exit than the one that followed Dewey & LeBoeuf’s 2012 collapse, when the estate pursued former partners for years.
Cyber kept firm management busy. Four Canadian firms including Bennett Jones, Borden Ladner Gervais, McCarthy Tétrault, and Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg disclosed breaches in a campaign targeting Toronto firms, the latest front in a year that leaves firms as both victim and defendant.
Practices
M&A and Capital Markets
Dealmakers kept transacting straight through the equity selloff, and the throughput points to steady sell-side, financing, and merger-review work. Marvell’s all-stock bet on Lumentum is a large, reviewable semiconductor tie-up; sponsors are still writing checks; and even a trimmed OpenAI round keeps capital-markets and governance teams busy as AI issuers test what the market will bear.
Selected Press:
Marvell agreed to buy laser maker Lumentum in a $115 billion all-stock deal, including debt, a bet on optical AI data-center connectivity, with two US firms leading the legal work.
Oracle filed to raise $20 billion, $10 billion of stock and $10 billion of senior notes, to fund its AI buildout.
OpenAI is seeking a smaller $20 billion at a lower $1.25 trillion valuation in its final pre-IPO round, while Anthropic disclosed $895.4 billion in compute and lease commitments and swung to a quarterly operating loss on revenue of about $17 billion ahead of its own listing.
Private equity firms CD&R and GTCR are weighing a buyout of $25 billion-listed payments processor Global Payments, and ExxonMobil doubled its stake in Mozambique’s Rovuma LNG project to 50% in a swap with Eni.
Private Equity and Governance
Boards are fielding activist pressure alongside a steady bid from sponsors and strategics, which keeps governance, defense, and sell-side mandates flowing. When an activist files, it is usually the starting gun for a multi-track review, not the finish line, and general counsel at targeted companies are weighing asset sales and defense strategy while potential acquirers quietly revisit their models.
Selected Press:
Oasis Management is pressuring Vail Resorts to sell some of its mountain assets.
Activist Fund 1 Investments is seeking to take Xponential Fitness, the owner of Club Pilates and Pure Barre, private at an 87% premium.
Mondelez International agreed to buy a majority stake in Undercover Snacks, and Ahold Delhaize will acquire Tesco’s Czech and Slovak business at a $2 billion enterprise value.
Regulatory, Litigation, and Data Privacy
Enforcement and disclosure are cutting several ways at once — a bankruptcy sale clearing over state objections, a tighter line on China exposure, insurers drawing fresh scrutiny, and another wave of cyber incidents — each a distinct advisory or defense mandate for general counsel and their outside firms.
Selected Press:
A US bankruptcy judge cleared chatbot maker Character.AI to sell its assets to Disney over objections from state attorneys general.
Nvidia told data-center clients that a majority of their own customers must be non-Chinese, pushing export-control planning onto buyers.
An insurer tied to Todd Boehly amassed billions in lending to his own Beverly Hills project as regulators step up scrutiny of insurers that extend credit to affiliated companies.
North Korea-linked hackers are expected to take months to launder the roughly $6.3 billion stolen from Binance, even as a fresh cyberattack knocked out supermarket freezers across Europe.
A federal judge dismissed President Trump’s $20 billion defamation suit against the Wall Street Journal, and the US Supreme Court refused his bid to intervene in California’s vote count.
Where the Work Sits
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Marvell’s connectivity deal, Oracle’s $20 billion raise, and Anthropic’s compute commitments point to acquisition-finance, capital-markets, and project-finance mandates, with disclosure work close behind as issuers report losses against enormous forward commitments.
Deal review is a second source. A $115 billion semiconductor tie-up, a possible Global Payments buyout, and cross-border energy moves keep merger-review, sell-side, and acquisition-finance teams busy, while activist campaigns at Vail Resorts and Xponential Fitness feed governance, defense, and strategic-review work.
Credit and insurance are a quieter but growing source. Scrutiny of insurers lending to affiliated owners, AI investors scrambling for downside insurance, and a credit fund forced to sell $800 million into margin calls all point to structured-finance, creditor-rights, and insurance-regulatory work. Recent credit scares have tended to begin as funding and redemption problems rather than credit-quality problems, which is why this kind of stress surfaces first in workout and creditor negotiations.
Cybersecurity brings another angle. The Canadian breach wave, the Binance laundering trail, and Europe’s retail hack keep incident-response, breach-notification, and class-action-defense work flowing for companies and the firms that advise them.
Global Markets
Clients are reading a sharp drop in oil and a steadier bond market as a possible financing window, even as central banks signal more tightening ahead.
Executives and treasurers are weighing whether cheaper energy and easing yields reopen room to finance deals, while dealmakers watch Friday’s jobs report for whether it keeps the Fed hiking. With the AI trade wobbling and rate decisions landing in the UK and Australia this week, the widening spread between strong and weak balance sheets is where careful financing advice earns its keep.
Selected Press:
Oil fell about 8% — Brent near $103, WTI under $96 — after Iran’s supreme leader approved talks with Washington, though the US struck Iran’s Qeshm Island on the eve of the vote.
Gold rebounded 1.8% to about $3,945 an ounce and the 10-year Treasury eased to 4.89%, down roughly 45 basis points since early October.
US manufacturing firmed — the ISM index rose to 55.5 — but real wages fell again, with pay growth of 3.1% trailing inflation and housing and food taking their biggest share of household budgets since 2010.
Australia raised rates to their highest since 2008 in a fifth hike, and the Bank of England is expected to lift rates for the first time since 2023.
Apple warned that soaring memory-chip costs will squeeze margins even as it overtook Nvidia as the world’s most valuable company.
Stories to Watch
US midterm elections (Tuesday, November 3) — control of Congress will set the enforcement and regulatory backdrop into 2027; bond investors are largely sitting the vote out.
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 next rate move.
RBA and Bank of England decisions (this week) — Australia’s fifth hike takes rates to their highest since 2008, and the BoE may raise for the first time since 2023.
Big tech earnings — AMD, Qualcomm, Uber, and Airbnb report, testing AI-capex and consumer demand after Apple’s margin warning.
Anthropic IPO (targeted week of November 16) — a listing at a reported $1.5–2 trillion would be a marquee capital-markets mandate and a disclosure test.
New Zealand election (November 7) — a tight race, with the kiwi already down about 6% since late August.
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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