On The Merits

Herbert Washer pushed Wall Street's Cahill Gordon & Reindel to expand its business after taking the helm, but he doesn't see the century-old firm joining the ranks of Big Law's largest players. "For us, the key has been to pick areas where we can be top of the market," said Washer, who took over from as Cahill’s sole leader last year. "You don't want to enter a market space where you're going to b...

Activist shareholders can make things difficult for the companies they target. But they represent a significant source of revenue for the law firms that represent those companies—and their shareholders. Bloomberg Law reporters Drew Hutchinson and Andrew Ramonas recently dug through the data on which firms did the most work on shareholder fights in the first half of this year. And Hutchinson talks...

Latham & Watkins took the perch as Big Law's leading M&A dealmaker in the first half of the year, surging past rival Kirkland & Ellis as things started to look up for firms whose fortunes are closely tied to corporate transactions. Many law firms were expecting a spike in M&A deals in the first quarter of this year, but that largely failed to materialize. Now, with 2025 half over, we're starting t...

McDermott Will & Emery just put the finishing touches on a big merger with another firm, and on today's On The Merits podcast, we speak to the firm's chairman, Ira Coleman, about the firm's audacious goals, why he thinks it's important to listen to everyone in the organization, and the firm's bet on tech. "If you're going to put $30 million in AI this year, you have to have scale," he told podcast...

Since the Supreme Court's affirmative action ruling, and especially since Donald Trump's anti-DEI campaign, many law firms have swiftly moved to alter or dismantle their programs promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI. So where does that leave people like Oyango Snell, a full-throated, unapologetic advocate of DEI in the legal industry? Snell is a former law professor who now runs a le...

The bar exam is in a state of flux. A new "NexGen" test is about to debut, while several states now offer licenses to attorneys who haven't taken the exam at all. These bar exam alternatives, many of which originated as emergency pandemic measures, are proving successful in smaller states, like South Dakota and New Hampshire, and even some larger ones, like Arizona and Oregon. But a nationwide bar...

Don't call it "flyover country." The firm Foley & Lardner has seen success opening offices in mid-tier cities such as Nashville, Raleigh, N.C., and Salt Lake City over the past four years. On today's episode of our podcast, On The Merits, Bloomberg Law's Roy Strom speaks with Foley's chairman and CEO, Daljit Doogal, about why he's taken his firm beyond the traditional Big Law power centers of Cali...

We don't know who is running ads on podcasts advocating for anti-litigation finance legislation. But, given how many enemies the practice has among conservatives and big business, the list of potential culprits is huge. Bloomberg Law reporter Emily R. Siegel wrote a story about these podcast ads, which call for restrictions on third parties who fund lawsuits in exchange for a cut of any awards the...

It's never a good look for a law firm to lose partners in bunches, and that's what's been happening at Paul Weiss in the past few weeks. Some of the firm's high-profile litigators have announced their departures, following the deal it struck with the Trump administration to avoid a punitive executive order. Ironically, the firm negotiated the White House agreement—which includes a pledge to provid...

Brad Bondi, a lawyer at Paul Hastings and brother of the current Attorney General, failed yesterday in his bid to become president of the DC bar association. But criticisms and attacks from conservatives on these legal groups, at both the state and national level, will likely continue. That's one of the takeaways from this week's episode of our podcast, On The Merits, in which Bloomberg Law report...

One would think that the Trump administration's pullback on enforcement across the federal government would mean fewer clients for attorneys to defend. But that would be overlooking another important law enforcer in our system: state attorneys general. Karl Racine and Jason Downs, both partners at the firm Hogan Lovells, are bolstering their practice specializing in helping clients under scrutiny...

Being a summer associate at a law firm can be tricky. On the one hand, you want to be remembered; on the other hand, you don't want to be remembered for the wrong reasons. On today's episode of our podcast, On The Merits, we hear from Kate Reder Sheikh, a partner in the associate practice group at Major, Lindsey & Africa, about the pitfalls that summer associates can fall into—from over-imbibing a...

Dozens of law firms have sought to de-emphasize, or outright kill, their diversity initiatives since the Supreme Court's 2023 affirmative action decision—and especially since Donald Trump retook office this year and started issuing punitive executive orders that mention them. However, one firm is now doing the opposite. Susman Godfrey announced last week it would expand its annual prize awarded to...

We're starting to see the impact of a string of deals reached over the last two months between President Donald Trump and top law firms. Some firms appear to be moving on—and even thriving—after pledging hundreds of millions of dollars in free legal services on causes backed by the White House to avoid punitive executive orders like those Trump has lobbed at others. At least three firms that made...

The Trump administration's attacks on law firms are having ripple effects on the general counsel whose companies employ those firms. Top attorneys at many large companies may be considering whether to switch the firms they use as outside counsel, according to Bloomberg Law reporter Brian Baxter. In some cases, GCs don't want to work with a firm that's under attack from President Donald Trump; in o...

Shortly after law firms started striking deals for free legal services with the White House, Bloomberg Law reporter Meghan Tribe appeared on our podcast, On The Merits, to talk about how much ambiguity there was around what the firms were agreeing to and how these agreements would be enforced. Now, Tribe and her colleague Brian Baxter have seen a copy of one of these deals but many unanswered ques...

The legal industry is in a state of tremendous flux after just 100 days of the second Trump administration, with the biggest law firms in the country under attack and the Department of Justice's independence in question. Three Bloomberg Law reporters covering three different beats teamed up to write a story chronicling everything that's been happening in the legal world since Donald Trump retook o...

Many students at elite law schools end up working in Big Law for at least a spell. The Trump administration's attacks on the industry, and deals with some of its top players, are making the choice of where to start their careers much more complicated. Students are stuck between two very uncertain options: go to a firm that struck a deal with the White House, despite concerns about a lack of princi...

Judge James Boasberg began the process of holding Trump administration officials in contempt of court last week as he struggles to get them to follow his orders around the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members. That contempt process was halted a few days later by an appellate court, but Boasberg's actions raised questions about how it might play out if he or another federal judge did even...

Like a run on a bank, law firms can quickly collapse if a few rainmakers pick up and take their books of business elsewhere—a vicious cycle that's hard to stop once it gets going. That's the takeaway from a law review article by Yale professor John Morley. He says a partner exodus can happen quickly because there's a huge financial incentive not to be one of the last partners remaining at a firm....

Law firms are striking deals with President Trump to avoid getting hit with a punitive executive order, and all of these deals include pledges of tens of millions of dollars in pro bono legal work. In this quickly changing landscape, it appears that the biggest law firm in the country, Kirkland & Ellis, is considering one of these commitments to the White House. However, the details of how these d...

"I cannot imagine a worse deal than the one that Skadden came away with." That's the opinion of one of the law firm's own associates, Rachel Cohen. The Chicago-based finance lawyer has grabbed the spotlight by criticizing Skadden and Paul Weiss for reaching agreements with President Donald Trump as he targets Big Law through a series of executive orders. She's also slammed others for staying quiet...

The US legal industry was already in a tough spot before President Donald Trump started attacking Big Law firms. Gloomy economic conditions and tariff-related uncertainty quickly tanked law firm leaders' expectations for a rebound that followed Trump's election. They're looking to stay off the president's target list in a wave of executive orders, while navigating a slowdown in deals activity and...

President Donald Trump has targeted major law firms in his second term in unprecedented ways. He hit three Big Law firms with executive orders that pose potentially existential threats to those firms. Then on March 21, the Trump administration issued a broad memo targeting any lawyer who files “frivolous, unreasonable, and even vexatious litigation against the United States.” On this podcast episo...

After Donald Trump won the presidential election, dealmakers at corporations—and the Big Law lawyers that represent them—were optimistic about the prospects for increased corporate mergers and acquisitions. But the first two months of 2025 have fallen far short of expectations. Not only have deal tallies been lower than hoped, they are the lowest in five years. On this episode of our podcast, On T...