Good afternoon,
Laterals kept moving at the top of the market: White & Case took M&A partner Sarah Remmer Long from Sullivan & Cromwell, Kirkland pulled tax partner Matt Donnelly from Gibson Dunn, and Ashurst Perkins hired a DOJ antitrust veteran. Morgan & Morgan is putting $1bn into AI and will sell its own tool to rival firms.
On the client side, the 10-year Treasury yield topped 5% and the Fed is set for its first hike under Chair Kevin Warsh on Wednesday. AI leaders’ call to slow development split the market, sinking chipmakers and lifting cybersecurity. SoftBank slid as OpenAI ruled out a 2026 listing, while Anthropic heads for Nasdaq. Oil held above $100 after Saudi Arabia shut a major pipeline, and diesel hit a record.
Now, on to what matters for your practice today.
Today’s Talking Points
-White & Case, Kirkland, Norton Rose and Foley Hoag add partners; Ashurst Perkins takes a DOJ antitrust veteran
-Morgan & Morgan commits $1bn to AI and will sell its tool to other firms; ex-SEC Commissioner Kara Stein joins Nixon Peabody
-Insurers and corporates press courts to disclose litigation funding; HSF Kramer disqualified from a bankruptcy over lender conflicts
-Vista weighs a $12bn Finastra sale; Kimberly-Clark preps EU remedies on its $40bn Kenvue deal
-The 10-year tops 5% as the Fed lines up a first hike under Warsh; Goldman flips to a hike call
-AI-slowdown calls split the tape: chips slump, cybersecurity and software rally; SoftBank drops on the OpenAI IPO delay
-DOJ fights to revive the Comey and James cases at the 4th Circuit; a lawyer is sanctioned over AI-fabricated citations
-UK flags a £258bn infrastructure gap as UK jobs weaken and diesel hits a record
Talent Strategy
Latest Moves
White & Case hired Sarah Remmer Long as a partner in its M&A and employment, compensation and benefits practices in New York, from Sullivan & Cromwell.
Kirkland & Ellis added tax partner Matt Donnelly from Gibson Dunn.
Norton Rose Fulbright hired Latham & Watkins partner Jen Smith for its corporate, M&A and securities group in Austin.
Foley Hoag brought on Anna Dodson from Goodwin as a partner and co-chair of its debt finance practice in Boston.
Ashurst Perkins Coie hired DOJ Antitrust Division veteran Adam Severt into its global antitrust and competition practice in Washington.
Croke Fairchild Duarte & Beres added capital markets partner Norly Jean-Charles in New York.
Nixon Peabody hired former SEC Commissioner Kara Stein into its government investigations and white-collar practice.
Covington & Burling added former Trump adviser Joseph Grogan as co-chair of public policy in Washington.
What today's moves tell us: firms are paying up for M&A, tax and antitrust talent in the US while pulling regulators and policy names in-house, and the same competition is surfacing fresh conflicts.
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
While a hot lateral market keeps surfacing conflicts and disclosure fights, firms are figuring out how to capitalize their intellectual capital by reframing how they look at AI: No longer an internal tool, but a revenue generation product line.
Conflicts are the flip side of the lateral race. Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer was disqualified as bankruptcy counsel for a West Virginia power-plant debtor after a judge found it had advised lenders controlled by Tony Robbins months before the Chapter 11. In the UK, listed firm Keystone Law said H1 revenue rose 23% and it will pay a special dividend.
Litigation funding drew a coordinated push. Insurers and major corporations, including companies targeted in funder-backed cases, asked courts on Monday to require disclosure of third-party investments, extending Big Law’s more cautious posture toward the asset class into a live procedural fight over transparency.
Morgan & Morgan, the largest US personal-injury firm, said it will commit $1bn to AI over the next decade and plans to sell its proprietary AI product to other firms next year. It is one thing for a firm to buy or build tools; selling them turns a cost center into a revenue line and tests where the business of law stops selling hours and starts selling software.
Practices
Corporate M&A and Antitrust
Dealmakers are pressing on scaled carve-outs and cross-border combinations, and the gating question is increasingly regulatory rather than financing. Sponsors and strategics are lining up remedies before they file, which points to steady merger-control, remedy-design and diligence work for competition teams on both sides of the Atlantic.
Selected Press:
Vista Equity Partners is exploring a $12bn sale of financial-software company Finastra, with Blackstone a potential bidder.
Kimberly-Clark is preparing asset sales to address EU antitrust concerns over its $40bn acquisition of Kenvue.
Banca Monte dei Paschi launched buyout offers for Banco BPM and Banca Generali to thwart a $40bn takeover by Intesa Sanpaolo; the offers cannot be revoked even if Intesa succeeds.
Euronext signaled it is open to a merger with Deutsche Boerse, and Puig Brands will buy the half of skincare group Isdin it does not own for $1.4bn.
Capital Markets and AI Finance
With the 10-year at 5%, treasurers and sponsors are pulling issuance forward and structuring around a single theme: AI. Bankers and general counsel are working refinancings, IPO timing and acquisition bonds against a narrowing window, which sustains securities, acquisition-finance and liability-management mandates.
Selected Press:
Anthropic is pressing toward a Nasdaq debut before year-end, while SoftBank fell 10.7% in Tokyo after OpenAI ruled out a 2026 listing.
Junk-rated companies are plotting some $13bn of early refinancings before rate hikes bite, per Bloomberg.
Aon drew $65bn of demand for a $13.5bn bond sale to fund its $17bn purchase of USI Insurance Services from KKR; Sysco is seeking $1bn in a share sale toward its $29bn deal for Jetro Restaurant Depot.
Kioxia is weighing a $10bn US listing, and six defense and space firms have struck SPAC mergers this year, double 2025’s total.
Litigation and Investigations
Enforcement and courtroom risk are converting into defense and advisory mandates across white-collar, cross-border and AI-exposed matters. General counsel are watching how far courts extend prosecutorial and evidentiary rules, because the answers reset playbooks well beyond the named parties.
Selected Press:
The DOJ urged the 4th Circuit to revive cases against James Comey and Letitia James; a ruling could reshape the government’s use of interim prosecutors in politically charged investigations.
A California judge ordered a lawyer to pay after finding State Farm filings included nonexistent, AI-fabricated cases.
Pfizer won approval to place liens on air-traffic-control fees to recover $2.2bn owed by Poland and Romania for unwanted Covid vaccines.
Musk’s X and xAI resolved their antitrust suit against Apple and OpenAI.
Regulatory and AI Governance
The AI-safety debate is now a Washington and geopolitics story, and it is generating governance, IP and professional-responsibility work as fast as the technology spreads. Boards and AI developers are weighing self-imposed guardrails against a policy path that may not arrive.
Selected Press:
Trump dismissed AI-slowdown calls as a “hoax,” singling out Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, while Microsoft joined “pacing” calls and pledged to build kill switches into its products; Trump and Xi are due to meet Sept 24 with AI governance on the agenda.
The Association of Corporate Counsel sued rival The L Suite for allegedly copying its materials to train a lawyer-focused chatbot.
Where the Work Sits
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Rates are now the organizing force across markets. With the 10-year at 5% and a Fed hike lined up, ordinary refinancings will start to tip into liability-management exercises, and junk issuers’ rush to refinance $13bn early. All this sends work toward capital markets, acquisition finance, restructuring and creditor-rights teams. In past cycles a higher-for-longer turn has fed the same desks.
Merger control is the gate and calculus for deal execution. Kimberly-Clark’s EU remedies on Kenvue, Vista’s Finastra process, the Monte dei Paschi defense against Intesa, and Euronext’s openness to Deutsche Boerse all point to filings, remedy design and cross-border diligence, where clients increasingly want antitrust risk priced before they sign.
AI keeps generating two kinds of work at once. Anthropic’s Nasdaq move, junk-market refinancings, and data-center build-out feed capital markets and project finance, while the safety fight, the chatbot-training suit against The L Suite, and sanctions over AI-fabricated filings feed AI-governance, IP and professional-responsibility mandates. Elite counsel that can speak finance, regulation and technology in the same matter will capture the high-end work.
Enforcement and cross-border risk also feed the demand. The Comey and James appeals, Pfizer’s cross-border collection fight, and the UK’s £258bn infrastructure gap keep white-collar, sovereign-facing and project-finance teams busy as capital chases long-duration assets.
Global Markets
A hot rate backdrop and higher oil are pushing central banks toward tightening just as the AI capex wave competes for capital. Treasurers and sponsors are deciding whether to lock financing before Wednesday’s Fed decision, with the 10-year at 5% and a hike now the base case.
Energy-exposed boards are re-running cost scenarios after the Saudi pipeline closure, and fund managers are treating the split between chipmakers and software as a signal about where AI spending actually lands. Every leg of this cycle has run through funding and rate windows first, which is why the move toward 5% is pulling issuance forward rather than shutting it down.
Selected Press:
The 10-year Treasury yield topped 5% intraday, its highest since 2023, and Goldman Sachs switched to a 25bp Fed-hike call for Wednesday, the first under Chair Warsh.
AI-slowdown calls split the tape: the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell about 5.9% while cybersecurity and incumbent software names rallied.
China’s new August bank lending came in far below forecast, with loan growth the weakest on record; UK payrolls dropped and household energy bills are forecast to jump about 25%.
US average diesel hit a record $6.23 a gallon, up roughly 60% since the Iran war began.
Stories to Watch
The FOMC decision Wednesday is the week’s main event; markets now price a 25bp hike and will parse the statement for signals on whether the tightening cycle is done.
Bank of England and Bank of Japan rate decisions follow Thursday and Friday, respectively; both face pressure to match Fed hawkishness amid sticky inflation.
Treasury Secretary Bessent and deputy-designate Tim Gadwood appear before the Senate Banking Committee Thursday in what will double as a hearing on tariff strategy and deficit management.
The Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE) files its formal exchange-registration application with the SEC this week; approval would create the first major US equity-exchange competitor outside New York in decades.
Holtec International and Orion Industrial kick off roadshows Monday for IPOs expected to price next week, testing investor appetite for nuclear-services and defense-tech names.
King Charles III hosts an AI-governance roundtable with heads of state Tuesday; separately, a Trump–Xi phone call is expected this week to discuss tariff de-escalation.
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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