Ben Thomson

The $8 Billion Fight That Shows Why Litigation Is Still the City’s Ultimate Blood Sport

Headlining, Law Stars - LawFuel's Leading Lawyers Profiles, LawStars, UK Law / May 25, 2026

A monster battle is unfolding in the sprawling claim against audit powerhouse PwC, born from the spectacular implosion of Chinese property behemoth China Evergrande, the most indebted property group in the world.

Senior silks like Richard Handyside KC, the Fountain Court Chambers’ Head, are facing off against those from 3 Verulam Buildings (3VB) where Adrian Beltrami KC represents the liquidators as they battle over allegations of negligence and misrepresentation in the $8.4 billion battle.

The numbers are eye-watering, even by City standards. Evergrande’s liquidators (led by Alvarez & Marsal’s Edward Middleton and Tiffany Wong) are pursuing 57 billion yuan (roughly $8.4 billion) in damages from PwC International, PwC Hong Kong, and PwC’s mainland China arm. They allege serious audit negligence and misrepresentation in the years leading up to Evergrande’s historic collapse, a King-sized property failure in a long list of major property failures.

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Paul Weiss Loses Two More Litigation Partners As Rivals Keep Picking Off Its Bench

Headlining, US Law / May 25, 2026

Paul Weiss Loses Two More Litigators As “Everything Is Fine” Narrative Gets Harder To Sell Ben Thomson, LawFuel contributing editor The litigation talent-bleed at Paul Weiss has not stopped, but has merely broadened its practice focus. Two more senior partners are heading for the exits, adding to a rolling series of departures that has turned

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Panel Games: Revolut’s New Legal Model is a Quarterly Hunger Games for Big Law

Headlining, Law Firm Technology, Law Firms / May 22, 2026

If you’re a partner at a Magic Circle firm currently leaning back in your Herman Miller chair, comforted by the warmth of a three-year panel appointment, you might want to sit up. The fintech disruptor that refuses to play by the rules is, predictably, about to break yours.

Revolut, the neobank recently valued at a staggering $45 billion following a secondary share sale (with some internal projections whispering closer to $75 billion), is officially binning the traditional legal panel model. In its place comes “Revolut Partners,” a system designed to treat law firms less like venerable institutions and more like high-performance software vendors.
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The Partner Who Signed the Brief: Inside Morgan & Morgan’s $5,000 AI Lesson

Featured, Law Firms, Lawyers, Legal AI, US Law / May 21, 2026

If you wanted a single case to put on the cover of every CLE brochure for the next five years, Wadsworth v. Walmart Inc. would do nicely. A hoverboard explodes in a Wyoming family’s home. The family sues. Their lawyers — from America’s loudest plaintiffs’ firm, no less — file a motion in limine citing nine cases. Eight of them do not exist. They have never existed. They were, in the now-familiar verb of our age, hallucinated.

And so on 24 February 2025, U.S. District Judge Kelly H. Rankin handed down what is shaping up to be the defining American sanctions order of the generative-AI era. Rudwin Ayala — the Morgan & Morgan associate who actually fed the brief into the firm’s in-house AI tool, charmingly named MX2.law — lost his pro hac vice admission and was fined $3,000.

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The Phantom Raise: Why The 2026 BigLaw Scale Hasn’t Moved — And Which Firm Breaks First

Big Law Salary Scale, Featured, Law Firm Salary Scale, US Law / May 18, 2026

It is May 2026, and the BigLaw salary scale has not moved for two and a half years.

That sentence would have sounded unthinkable in 2021, when Milbank ignited a comp war that pushed first-year associates from $190,000 to $215,000 in eight weeks. Three years on, Class of 2025 first-years are starting on $225,000 — the same number Milbank put on the board in November 2023. Eighth-years are still on $435,000. Cravath confirmed in its November 18, 2025 bonus memo, in writing, that base salaries would not rise in 2026.

The lockstep is intact. The escalator has stopped.

So when does it start again, we ask – and presumably you want the answer to that so we’ve done our best to pose some on-the-button questions.

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How a Box of Hong Kong Cupcakes Triggered a $36m Law Partner Meltdown

Headlining, Law Firms, Power List / May 15, 2026

Quick question: “If a star rainmaker built ‘their’ office, do they get to secretly take it with them – or does the partnership own everything they touch?”

When the Australian Financial Review recently devoted a major feature to “the $36 million box of Hong Kong cupcakes”, it wasn’t really about baked goods – it was about how a high‑performing litigation boutique managed to blow itself up in plain sight.
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Quinn Emanuel’s John Quinn Steps Down — The Man Who Built a $2.8 Billion Litigation Empire

Featured, Law Firm Management, LawPreneur, LawStars, US Law / May 12, 2026

John B. Quinn, the Harvard-trained litigator who turned a scrappy four-lawyer Los Angeles firm into the world’s most feared litigation powerhouse, which also achieved ‘fearsome profits’, has stepped down from the helm of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan after four decades at the top.

The announcement was made to partners on Sunday and described by some in the legal press as arriving “abruptly”, bringing to a close one of the most remarkable leadership tenures in Big Law history.

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The Elite Law Pipeline to Prison And How a Decade-Long Insider Trading Ring Pierced Big Law’s Inner Circle

Big Law, Headlining, US Law / May 10, 2026

A 30-person federal indictment has implicated attorneys from Wachtell, Latham, Willkie, Goodwin, Cleary, Sidley, Weil and DLA Piper in what prosecutors call one of the most sweeping M&A intelligence networks ever prosecuted on American soil.

The access a law firm grants its attorneys is built on a simple, foundational covenant: what comes through the door stays within those walls. For a decade, federal prosecutors allege, a network of Ivy League-trained lawyers decided that covenant was negotiable — and that confidential merger data was simply a different kind of billable asset.

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$12 Million Paydays, a $10 Billion Firm, and Biglaw’s Best Run in Years

Big Law, Headlining, Law Firm Salary Scale, US Law / May 2, 2026

A decade ago, $6 million was considered a breathtaking partner payday at a top US law firm. Today, that figure barely cracks the Am Law 100’s top ten. The 2026 Am Law 100 rankings, reflecting 2025 financial performance, tell the story of an industry that has fundamentally reset what “profitable” means: $178.95 billion in aggregate revenues, a $12.15 million average payout for equity partners at Wachtell Lipton, and Kirkland & Ellis becoming the first law firm in history to surpass $10 billion in annual revenue.

The rich got richer, the gap widened, and almost nobody at the top is apologising for it.

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Private Equity MSO Deal Lawyers – The Holland & Knight Lawyers Closing 15+ Law Firm Transactions in Six Months

Headlining, Law Firms, US Law / April 28, 2026

By Ben Thomson, LawFuel contributing editor| April 28, 2026 The quiet revolution in law firm ownership is no longer quiet it appears as Holland & Knight is proving. Private equity and venture capital are pouring into the legal industry as we have reported and they are now working through management services organizations (MSOs), which is

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