On The Merits

Most of the biggest law firms in the US have a two-tier partnership model, where some partners have equity in the firm while others don't. So it was a bit of a surprise when the firm Ropes & Gray announced last month it will be sticking with its one-tier model.  Is this a sign that the trend toward non-equity partners is starting to reverse? Not according to today's guests on our podcast, On The M...

On this episode of our podcast, On The Merits, we take another look at the reasoning behind the deals law firms struck with the Trump administration earlier this year to avoid punitive executive orders. We previously heard from Yale Law School professor John Morley, who said these firms had no choice because an executive order could have kickstarted a devastating run on the partnership. Today's po...

Goodwin Procter made a splash this month when it announced it had raked in $2.7 billion in the 2025 fiscal year, a record for the firm and a 12% gain from the previous year On this episode of our news podcast, On The Merits, we hear from the firm's chair, Anthony McCusker, about how Goodwin managed this feat. He tells Bloomberg Law reporter Tatyana Monnay that he attributes the firm's recent succe...

Today's guest on our podcast, On The Merits, is a general counsel who is looking for more from the law firms trying to win his business. Specifically, he wants to hear more about how and why they're using AI. Eric Dodson Greenberg is the top lawyer at Cox Media Group, which owns dozens of TV and radio stations across the country. He recently wrote a series of articles for Bloomberg Law about how g...

President Donald Trump's attacks on law firms have hand their intended impact, even as courts shoot down executive orders against some as unconstitutional and the details of White House deals with others remain unclear, according to Yale Law School professor John Morley. "The point here is to extract a demonstrative form of obedience," Morely said. He said he's already seen a "chilling effect" wit...

You don't get to be the oldest law firm in New York without weathering some rough spots. But this may be one of the most difficult periods Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft has ever gone through.  The Wall Street firm, which this week announced a new managing co-partner, has lost nearly three dozen partners just this year. And not all of them have left because of the firm's controversial deal with Pre...

Law firms "have gold sitting on their hard drives," according to Yale Law School professor Scott Shapiro. Shapiro has enthusiastically embraced the use of generative AI in his classroom. He says firms should draw on the mountains of proprietary information at their fingertips to build their own tools. "If only they would train the large language models correctly, they, I believe, would get absolut...

On today's episode of On The Merits we hear from three lawyers working in the white hot world of data center projects. Mike Rechtin and Justin Stolte are, respectively, real estate and energy partners with Latham & Watkins, and Michelle Kallen is an appellate and advocacy partner at Steptoe. "The latest number that I've seen is a $50 billion annual investment in the data center construction area b...

The number of law students who graduated in the class of 2024 spiked compared to previous years. That worries Nikia Gray, the head of the National Association for Law Placement. "I think it's going to be a big mistake for law schools to continue to admit large law school class sizes," she said, "when we can predict with some pretty good certainty that GenAI is changing the business models of firms...

It's still not clear what, if any, fallout the law firms that struck pro bono deals with President Donald Trump earlier this year will face. But analyzing attorney movements over the last six months provides one data point. On average, law firms that settled subsequently lost attorneys more attorneys than those who fought the president in court, according to data obtained by Bloomberg Law columnis...

Delaware recently changed its corporate laws to make them more favorable to companies being sued by their shareholders and the mega-firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz was deeply involved in that process. That's raising some eyebrows because Wachtell is also a go-to firm for companies in Delaware, often called the corporate capital of the world. Lawyers from other prominent firms, like Wilson Sons...

A memo from law firm King & Spalding to its associates saying they need to log 2,400 "productive hours" a year surprised some in the legal world. But today's guest on our podcast, On The Merits, says it shouldn't have. It's always been the case that lawyers need to go beyond meeting their billable hours quotas and put in some non-billable hours in order to advance their careers, according to Jessi...

Like most schools worried about academic integrity, the University of Chicago Law School used to discourage its first-year students from using generative AI but now it has crept into that first-year curriculum. Despite its overall inevitability, William Hubbard, a professor and deputy dean, says he's surprised by how often he has to encourage AI-skeptical law students to at least try it out. Hubba...

The Big Four accounting firm KPMG has taken advantage of relaxed rules in Arizona to start a law firm there, but the company has broader ambitions outside of the state. KPMG says it doesn't want to compete with established players in the legal industry, but Big Law leaders are privately expressing concerns. That's according to Justin Henry, a Bloomberg Law reporter who's the guest on today's episo...

The largest law firms in the country are fiercely competitive, so it's notable when nearly 40 of them agree to sign on to a legal brief. That's what happened in an appellate case that could have eroded the attorney-client privilege—and the firms' lucrative white collar defense practices. They breathed a collective sigh of relief earlier this month when the Sixth Circuit overturned a lower court ru...

Benjamin Klubes is a Big Law expat who just founded his own litigation-focused boutique firm—and he's not alone. Other former partners at larger law firms are now either moving to smaller litigation-only firms or, like Klubes, starting their own. In this episode of our podcast, On The Merits, Klubes talks with Bloomberg Law reporter Tatyana Monnay about why he thinks these boutique firms are bette...

If it wasn't already clear, it is now: well-capitalized investors want a piece of the US legal industry. The latest example of this trend came this week when the litigation funder Burford Capital announced that now, in addition to financing individual lawsuits, it also wants to buy minority stakes in entire law firms. This comes after the consulting giant KPMG won a license earlier this year to st...

The allure of making partner doesn't hold the same appeal that it used to for many Big Law associates. Some of them are swallowing a pay cut to jump to a smaller firm. That's according to Major, Lindsey & Africa partner and recruiter Kate Reder Sheikh, who wrote about the trend for Bloomberg Law. She spoke to Bloomberg Law editor Jessie Kokrda Kamens for our podcast, On The Merits, about why some...

The law firm Norton Rose Fullbright thought it was taking a great leap forward when it brought on two partners and acquired the legal tech startup they co-founded, NMBL Technologies. Now, the firm and the startup are mired in a messy litigation battle against one another. On this episode of our podcast, On The Merits, Bloomberg Law reporters Alex Ebert and Evan Ochsner get into the unusual agreeme...

A wave of associate lawyers resigned in protest from their Big Law jobs earlier this year after their firms struck controversial pro bono deals with the Trump administration. Do they have any regrets? According to Bloomberg Law reporters Justin Henry and Elleiana Green, not really. They spoke with several former associates who say they stand by their decisions to, as one legal recruiter put it, "l...

Fenwick & West's decision to seek equity in one of its tech startup clients is now, with the benefit of hindsight, looking like a stroke of genius. Figma Inc. last week had a blockbuster IPO and Fenwick made money not only advising its client on going public, but also through the firm's ownership of almost 900,000 shares in the design and collaboration software company, according to Bloomberg Law...

Susman Godfrey has shown it's willing to take on high-risk, high-reward lawsuits with unconventional fee structures. Its leaders say this risk appetite is ingrained in the firm's culture. "When we vote to take a case, it is a case of the firm," Kalpana Srinivasan, a managing partner at the firm, said on our podcast, On The Merits. "You hear sometimes there may be other places where there are a cou...

Neal Katyal and Gurbir Grewal, lawyers who command well over $2,000 an hour for their services, are slashing their rates to defend two New Jersey municipalities against a Justice Department lawsuit over their "sancutary city" policies. This on its own would be noteworthy, but what makes it even more interesting is that their law firm—Manhattan-based Milbank LLP—reached a deal with the White House...

Junior lawyers can climb the ranks faster than ever before, according to DLA Piper leader Frank Ryan, but they also should think about checking their politics at the door. Associates "need to be mindful of over rotating into politics," Ryan, the firm's global co-chair, said in the latest edition of Bloomberg Law's On The Merits podcast. "We live in an overly partisan world. Yes, you have strongly...

Former Davis Polk associate Ryan Powers started writing op-eds for local newspapers earlier this year criticizing the Trump administration's agenda. A few months later, the Wall Street firm he worked for fired him. Powers' story is one example of how some Big Law lawyers have had to make tough career choices since the president retook office. On this episode of our podcast, On The Merits, Powers s...