Good afternoon,
Weil's London M&A leader David Avery-Gee is confirmed to join Sullivan & Cromwell lifting the firm's departures to near 30 for this year. Gibson Dunn lifted a three-partner products liability team from Paul Weiss, White & Case took an M&A partner from Freshfields, and Cahill posted double-digit growth. OpenAI, Cooley and Ropes & Gray pushed legal AI deeper into firm workflows.
On the client side, markets rallied after Warsh's Fed hike, with the S&P 500 up 1.1% and the 10-year back below 5%. The Bank of Japan raised rates to 1.25%, a three-decade high, and KKR, Blackstone and Brookfield lined up rival bids for GFL Environmental.
Now, on to what matters for your practice today.
Today’s Talking Points
-Weil’s London M&A head David Avery-Gee decamps to Sullivan & Cromwell as departures near 30
-Gibson Dunn grabs a Paul Weiss products-liability team; White & Case takes a Freshfields M&A partner; Loeb & Loeb opens in Singapore
-Cahill returns to double-digit growth and ~$6m profits per partner as firms pay up for star talent
-OpenAI launches Astra for Law with S&C, Ropes and Cooley; Cooley debuts an AI IPO-prep tool
-Markets rally and yields fall after the Fed hike; the BoJ lifts rates to a 30-year high; the BoE holds 6-3
-KKR, Blackstone and Brookfield vie for GFL; Carlyle and CVC buy BauWatch; Apollo weighs an Energos sale
-Citigroup prints a record $12bn bond; the SEC clears tokenized stocks; CoreWeave and CleanSpark tap AI debt
-Blackstone opens a real-estate fund exit as PE turns to CFOs and NAV loans to court insurers
Talent Strategy
Latest Moves
Sullivan & Cromwell is set to hire M&A partner David Avery-Gee, Weil’s London co-managing partner, whose exit brings the firm’s departures near 30 this year.
Gibson Dunn hired mass torts and products liability chair Kimberly Branscome and a three-partner team from Paul Weiss.
White & Case is hiring M&A, infrastructure and private-capital partner Natascha Doll from Freshfields in Hamburg, where she co-led the CEE/CIS practice.
Polsinelli added Andrew Raby to its investment strategies and capital solutions practice in Chicago.
Loeb & Loeb opened a Singapore office, hiring capital markets partner Xavier Amadei from Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer and relocating Hong Kong partner Lewis Ho.
What today’s moves tell us: firms keep paying up for proven M&A, litigation and capital-markets partners, and the biggest firms are not slowing down when they have the opportunity to lift full teams from elite rivals.
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 rebuilding around resilient and growing practices even as star-partner pay climbs.
Cahill Gordon & Reindel is on track for double-digit revenue growth this year after leaning less on cyclical corporate finance and expanding bankruptcy, M&A and white-collar work. Managing partner Herb Washer said the roughly 350-lawyer firm’s lean structure lets it pay partners a larger share of revenue than almost any competitor, with profits per partner nearing $6m in 2025. The rising price tag for star partners is the main test of that model.
Gibson Dunn formalized an 85-lawyer higher-education group now defending six schools across more than a dozen DOJ and EEOC investigations.
The bigger undercurrent shift is AI moving into core legal work. OpenAI launched Astra for Law, a version of GPT-6 tuned for legal analysis and aimed at Am Law 200 firms, naming Sullivan & Cromwell, Ropes & Gray and Cooley as development partners. Cooley rolled out an AI tool to prepare companies for IPOs, and Ropes is building agentic workflows for transactional due diligence.
Practices
Corporate M&A and Private Equity
Sponsors and strategics kept signing through the Fed’s hike, and the mix of megadeals and infrastructure bets says boards still have the confidence to commit capital. That appetite keeps M&A, financing and antitrust mandates flowing to the firms advising the dealmaking elite.
Selected Press:
KKR, Energy Capital Partners and Blackstone teamed up to bid for GFL Environmental against a rival Brookfield and IFM Investors group, in what could be one of the year’s largest leveraged buyouts.
Carlyle and CVC agreed to buy Dutch security-technology provider BauWatch from Haniel at a $1.15bn valuation, and Apollo is exploring a sale of floating-LNG provider Energos Infrastructure above $3bn.
Nvidia committed $2bn to Brookfield’s AI-infrastructure fund alongside the Kuwait Investment Authority, part of a $10bn raise, and EQT set out plans to invest $50bn in India by 2030, including $30bn in data centers.
Sazerac is in talks to buy Germany’s Berentzen, and Botswana may settle for a 15% stake in De Beers as Anglo American pursues a sale.
Capital Markets and AI Finance
The financing machine behind AI kept running even with rates higher, and issuers moved fast to lock in funding. Each leg of this buildout has hit funding and structuring limits before demand limits, so the work lands first with capital-markets, project-finance and private-credit teams.
Selected Press:
Citigroup raised $12bn in its largest-ever dollar bond sale, and Apollo is in talks to lift SoftBank’s loan to $9bn from $5.4bn to help fund its OpenAI investment.
CoreWeave is raising $3bn in convertible bonds and CleanSpark is seeking $2.2bn in a debut junk-bond sale for AI infrastructure tied to Meta.
The SEC created a pathway for trading venues to list tokenized US stocks, effective immediately, two days after the Senate stalled the Clarity Act.
Crusoe raised a $3.9bn round at a $30.9bn valuation, and Revolut is planning a dual US and London IPO.
Private Credit and Restructuring
Higher rates are exposing strain in real estate and leveraged books even as managers engineer new ways to pull in capital, and the split is what generates work. Where returns sour, mandates move to secondaries, workout and creditor-rights teams; where capital is still being raised, fund-formation and structuring desks stay busy.
Selected Press:
Blackstone is arranging a secondary sale to let investors exit an $11bn US real-estate fund after high rates hurt returns and drove redemption requests.
Private-equity secondaries managers are using collateralized fund obligations and tranched NAV loans to draw insurance capital; CFO issuance rose to $6.5bn in 2025 from about $400m in 2021.
Braskem bondholders are resisting a restructuring proposal, raising pressure on Petrobras over a previously agreed $11bn out-of-court deal.
Regulatory, Antitrust and Governance
Merger enforcement and AI oversight are both live, and each fight converts into advisory and litigation work. Boards and dealmakers are recalibrating execution risk as the DOJ tests how far states can push and as AI governance moves from theory onto board agendas.
Selected Press:
The DOJ publicly attacked state-led legal challenges to major US mergers, escalating a fight with attorneys general over deal enforcement.
A federal judge detailed Google’s remedy, requiring it to make its ad-tech interoperable, share auction data with publishers and accept a compliance monitor.
Google, Anthropic and OpenAI discussed an industry-funded body to test advanced models after OpenAI disclosed new instances of concerning model behavior.
Where the Work Sits
***
With the Fed signaling more hikes and the BoJ off the floor, routine refinancings tip into liability-management and workout files, and the strain surfacing in Blackstone’s real-estate fund and Braskem’s restructuring points to more creditor-rights and secondaries work for New York and London desks. In past tightening cycles, the same rate move has fed capital-markets, acquisition-finance and restructuring teams at once.
In this AI buildout cycle, the binding constraints remain power and financing structure that can accommodate different risk profiles and timeframes, which is why Citigroup’s record bond, the CoreWeave and CleanSpark issues, and EQT’s India program send high-end matters to elite firms with standout capital markets, project finance, energy and real estate teams.
The DOJ’s attack on state merger challenges, the detailed Google remedy, and the contest for GFL keep antitrust, merger-control and deal-litigation teams busy well past signing, while the AI-governance debate adds board-advisory and compliance work.
The BauWatch and Energos processes and PE’s move into CFOs and NAV loans point to leveraged-finance, fund-formation and secondaries mandates, while Nvidia’s fund commitment and EQT’s India push signal cross-border infrastructure and project-finance work.
Global Markets
The first Fed hike in three years landed as reassurance, not a shock. The increase, although irritating president Trump, earned Chairman Wash credibility and the rest of the world’s central banks are moving with it.
Treasurers, sponsors and boards are working with their bankers to reprice financing against a Fed that flagged more hikes, with the dot plot pointing to further tightening into next year. Fund managers are watching a Bank of Japan now off the zero bound, a Bank of England leaning hawkish, and an oil market waiting on the Saudi pipeline. Markets are treating this hike, not last year’s cut, as the anchor for the cost of capital.
Selected Press:
The S&P 500 rose 1.1% and the 10-year yield slipped below 5% for the first time in nine sessions as markets read the hike as credibility, not crisis.
The Bank of Japan raised its policy rate to 1.25%, a roughly three-decade high, though dissents and a wide US-Japan gap kept pressure on the yen.
The Bank of England held at 3.75% in a 6-3 vote and said it would stop long-end gilt sales, while China’s Treasury holdings fell to their lowest since 2008.
Trump threatened new tariffs on the EU over its plan to make Canada an associate member, on top of an existing 50% levy on Canadian goods.
Stories to Watch
Bank of Japan aftermath and RBA decision — with the BoJ at a 30-year high and an RBA hike heavily priced, the rate gap with a hawkish Fed stays in focus.
US September triple witching (today, Sept. 18) — roughly $6.2tn of options expire, one of the year’s heaviest sessions.
Trump-Xi summit (Sept. 24) — tariffs top the agenda after Trump’s new EU threat and a Russian-oil tariff bill headed for his signature.
Electra Therapeutics and Orion180 IPOs — fresh reads on issuance appetite after Holtec pulled its listing.
Fed’s October meeting — the dot plot points to more tightening; the path sets refinancing windows into year-end.
Progressive (today) and AutoZone (Tuesday) earnings — consumer and insurance demand signals as rates climb.
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.
Thanks for reading!
We’d like your feedback. Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected].
