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Weil Gotshal is bracing to lose a group of Weil Gotshal & Manges London private equity and leveraged-finance partners, the latest crack in a firm that has shed talent across its ranks all year. Kirkland & Ellis retook the Big Law M&A crown, advising on more than $570bn of deals in the first nine months, and former Allen & Overy head Wim Dejonghe launched an AI-native firm built to retire the billable hour.
On the client side, the global bond selloff cooled after Fed officials signaled no rush for back-to-back rate hikes, even as UK 30-year yields topped 6% and France’s debt crisis deepened. The SEC moved to open private markets to retail money, Broadcom agreed to lend Anthropic $42bn against its chips, and a federal judge handed Google a win over publishers on AI Overviews.
Now, on to what matters for your practice today.
Today’s Talking Points
-Weil set to lose key London PE and leveraged-finance partners / Kirkland retakes the M&A crown at $570bn
-Former A&O head Wim Dejonghe launches an AI-native firm / US law-firm mergers slip in Q3
-Wachtell makes a rare lateral hire / King & Spalding, Freshfields, Dechert and Holland & Knight add partners
-Bond selloff cools as the Fed signals no rush on hikes / UK 30-year tops 6% and France’s crisis deepens
-SEC opens private markets to retail / Apollo rolls out daily credit marks as Carlyle flags AI concentration risk
-Broadcom to lend Anthropic $42bn / Nvidia and SoftBank finish their $20bn OpenAI checks
-Kone to sell TK Elevator’s European arm to save a $33.3bn buyout / Onsemi recuts its Synaptics deal to cash
-Google beats publishers over AI Overviews / New Mexico seeks $40bn from Meta
Talent Strategy
Latest Moves
Weil Gotshal & Manges is set to lose several top London private equity and leveraged-finance partners, extending a run of departures that has rattled the firm.
Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz made a rare lateral hire, bringing former Manhattan federal prosecutor Joon Kim into its New York litigation ranks from Cleary Gottlieb.
King & Spalding hired restructuring partner Ted Dillman from Latham & Watkins in New York, and Dechert added private credit partner Isabella Vecchio to its capital solutions team there.
Freshfields took capital markets partner Justin Michael from DLA Piper in New York, and Holland & Knight hired Clifford Chance capital markets partner Jake Farquharson in the same market.
Greenberg Traurig added FDA partner Gail Javitt from Hyman Phelps in Washington and construction partner Ben Patton from Ashurst in London; Winston Taylor took digital-assets partner Michael Frisch in Chicago; and WilmerHale hired longtime SEC enforcement lawyer Sam Waldon in Washington.
Twelve Wiley Rein lawyers left to launch Tyka, a Washington boutique focused on insurer-side coverage litigation.
What today’s moves tell us: the lateral market is rewarding restructuring, private credit and ex-regulator talent, and the churn at Weil shows how fast a weakened partnership can bleed its most portable books.
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 being pushed to prove where growth and profit will come from as AI reshapes pricing and M&A fees thin out.
Kirkland & Ellis regained the top spot among Big Law dealmakers, advising on more than $570bn of deals through the first nine months, ahead of Sullivan & Cromwell and Gibson Dunn. Its biggest mandates were AI-driven: NextEra’s planned $67bn purchase of Dominion and Cursor’s $60bn sale to SpaceX. M&A activity fell 10% over the quarter, and executive committee member Michael Weisser said middle-market work is picking up even if the market is ‘not red hot.’
The billable hour is under fresh attack. Former Allen & Overy senior partner Wim Dejonghe teamed with an ex-Freshfields lawyer and other co-founders to launch an AI-native firm pitched on fixed pricing rather than hours. It lands as US law-firm mergers slipped to 58 so far this year from 61 a year ago, per Fairfax Associates, a sign that scale ambitions are meeting a more cautious market.
Governance and pay are shifting too. Morgan Lewis named a four-person team to support incoming chair David McManus, and an Equilar study found senior women general counsel are now out-earning male peers at the largest US companies, helped by stronger stock-award negotiations.
Practices
Corporate M&A and Private Equity
Dealmakers are still moving on strategic assets, but the quarter’s 10% drop in M&A and a wave of recut or remedy-driven deals show how much financing costs and antitrust risk now shape structure. Sponsors and corporate clients are leaning on counsel to redesign consideration, clear regulators and keep processes alive, which points to steady sell-side, merger-control and financing work for the dealmaking elite.
Selected Press:
Kone agreed to sell most of TK Elevator’s European business to clear antitrust concerns over its $33.3bn purchase of the unit from Advent and Cinven.
Onsemi recut its takeover of Synaptics to about $5.7bn in cash, swapping out a roughly $7bn all-stock structure as buyers adjust to weaker equity currencies.
Authentic Brands is weighing a bid above $6bn for Barbie-maker Mattel, while Sanofi and Regeneron expanded their drug partnership by $8bn.
Warburg Pincus is in talks for a stake in Franco-German tankmaker KNDS, and Lufthansa and Air France-KLM raised their joint offer for 49.9% of TAP Air Portugal above $1.1bn.
Capital Markets, Private Credit and Restructuring
The bond selloff’s pause gives issuers a window, but higher-for-longer rates and rising scrutiny of private-asset valuations are keeping financing, workout and fund-formation desks busy. Recent credit scares have tended to begin as funding and valuation problems rather than credit-quality ones, and this week’s run of fresh marks, covenant relief and disclosure pressure fits that pattern for lenders and their counsel.
Selected Press:
The SEC moved to open private markets to retail investors, widening the accredited-investor definition and letting advisers charge performance fees of up to 20% in retail products.
Apollo began rolling out daily marks across its $850bn credit book after the SEC’s ‘critical reminder’ on hard-to-value private assets; Carlyle warned that private credit’s push into AI lending is raising concentration risk.
Morningstar DBRS found 15% of rated private-credit borrowers are seeking covenant relief, and the share deferring interest nearly doubled to 6.8%, while a LODAS and Nasdaq auction cleared 91% of offered interval-fund shares.
Ares raised $4.2bn for a debut secondaries fund and Oaktree $2bn for a first asset-backed finance fund, as Broadcom agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42bn against its chips.
AI, Regulation and IP
The AI build-out keeps generating financing and disputes in the same breath, and courts are starting to mark the limits of liability for the biggest platforms. For boards and general counsel, AI governance, export-controls and IP work is now a standing line item rather than a one-off.
Selected Press:
A federal judge dismissed Chegg’s and Penske Media’s antitrust suits over Google’s AI Overviews, leaving licensing deals as publishers’ main route to payment.
Nvidia and SoftBank made their final $10bn payments into OpenAI’s round, lifting SoftBank’s stake to about 13%, while Australian neocloud Sharon AI landed a $356m GPU-backed loan, showing chip-collateral financing spreading.
A state-backed Chinese firm was found to have funded purchases of restricted Nvidia chips, and US prosecutors arrested a California man over $300m of alleged chip smuggling to China.
OpenAI fired three safety researchers for mishandling sensitive information, and California AG Rob Bonta subpoenaed the company over AI cybersecurity risks.
Litigation and Enforcement
State attorneys general and regulators are driving the most active exposure, from privacy penalties to labor and product claims, keeping defense, settlement and carve-out liability teams in demand.
Selected Press:
New Mexico asked a court to make Meta pay up to $40bn after a jury found it misled consumers over Cambridge Analytica.
Lyft agreed to pay $272.5m to settle California claims that it misclassified drivers as contractors.
A group of states sued Corteva and spinoff Vylor, alleging the seed-business carve-out was built to dodge tens of billions in ‘forever chemicals’ liability.
Florida’s attorney general sued Pfizer and CEO Albert Bourla over COVID-19 vaccine claims, and Moderna lost a bid to use a government patent license to defeat Northwestern’s infringement suit.
Where the Work Sits
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The AI build-out keeps turning capital into legal work faster than it turns into megawatts. Broadcom’s $42bn chip-lease loan to Anthropic, Sharon AI’s GPU-backed facility and the final Nvidia and SoftBank checks into OpenAI point to more structured-finance, project-finance and capital-markets mandates, while the Chinese chip-funding disclosures and a fresh smuggling arrest keep export-controls and CFIUS teams busy.
Private markets are the other engine. The SEC’s retail push, Apollo’s daily marks, Carlyle’s concentration warning and a rising share of borrowers seeking covenant relief all point the same way: in past cycles, stress in private credit has run through valuation, liability-management and creditor-rights desks well before it shows up as defaults, and the day’s disclosure and liquidity moves set up exactly that work.
Deal complexity is spreading mandates. Recut structures like Onsemi-Synaptics, remedy-driven sales like Kone’s TK Elevator divestment and a thinner but larger pipeline drive merger-control, financing and structuring work even as volumes fall.
AI oversight is now its own practice. The Google Overviews dismissal, the OpenAI safety firings, Bonta’s subpoena and state privacy penalties against Meta keep AI-governance, IP, privacy and white-collar teams in steady demand.
Global Markets
A cooling bond market set the tone, even as Europe’s stress deepened. Clients are weighing whether the pause in the selloff is a genuine turn or a breather: Fed officials signaled no urgency for consecutive hikes, pushing October hike odds down, while UK 30-year yields hit 6% and France’s crisis deepened. Executives and treasurers are reading a firmer US growth picture against stickier inflation abroad as they time financing and issuance.
Selected Press:
Fed officials said there is no rush for back-to-back rate hikes, US second-quarter GDP was revised up to 2.2%, and companies announced the fewest September job cuts since 2022.
UK 30-year yields topped 6% for the first time since 1998 and munis logged their worst month since 2008, while France’s debt crisis deepened ahead of a Macron-led G7 call on releasing oil reserves.
Euro-zone inflation hit a three-year high and Tokyo’s price gauge ran above the BOJ’s target, even as US core inflation stayed contained.
Oil pushed back above $100 after China scrapped October fuel exports.
Stories to Watch
September jobs report (today) – the last major labor read before the Nov. 3 midterms, with average hourly earnings seen up 3.1%.
Supreme Court term opens Monday – the justices will weigh a challenge to mandatory immigration detention, a policy that has already drawn more than 73,000 suits this year.
Macron-led G7 call (today) – weighing a release of about 100 million barrels of diesel and crude as oil tops $100.
Anthropic’s $100bn IPO – now targeted before Thanksgiving, anchoring a crowded listing calendar.
Third-quarter bank earnings (coming days) – a first read on how lenders mark private-credit books after the SEC’s warning.
Nike and Accenture earnings – Nike flagged new layoffs from 2027 while Accenture beat on AI-driven bookings.
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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