Big Law – Page 2

America’s Biggest Personal Injury Firm Eyes Billion-Dollar Private Equity Deal — and a Future IPO

Big Law, Power Firms, Power Law Firms - Global, US Law / June 8, 2026

e firm that built its empire on highway billboards and the populist slogan “For the People” is now talking to Wall Street.

Morgan & Morgan, the largest personal injury law firm in the United States, has hired JPMorgan to explore a minority stake sale that could raise more than $1 billion and pave the way for a public listing years from now.

Morgan & Morgan founder John Morgan, a Florida-based billionaire and political donor, confirmed he was exploring deal options in a statement to Bloomberg Law, describing the discussions as “purely exploratory” with no immediate plan or timeline in place. “We’re simply listening to people smarter than us and working to understand the pros and cons,” he told BloombergLaw.

The story, first reported by the Financial Times and subsequently confirmed by Reuters and Bloomberg Law, lands as a landmark moment for the US legal services industry, which has long resisted outside capital while watching adjacent professional services sectors transform under private equity ownership.

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The LawFuel Tomatometer: the US law Firms that Lawyers Actually Want to Work For

Big Law, Press Releases, US Law / June 6, 2026

Forget the Vault 100. Forget the AmLaw 100. Especially forget the breathless rankings that measure law firm “prestige” by how many billionaires a firm represents or how many billions it bills.

Those lists tell you who the market thinks is elite. They don’t tell you whether the lawyers inside those buildings are happy, burnt out, mentored, or quietly updating their LinkedIn profiles at 11pm on a Tuesday.

So we built something different. Call it the LawFuel Tomatometer — a composite “freshness score” for US law firms that aggregates what associates and midlevel lawyers actually say about their own employers, drawn from the most credible lawyer-driven surveys in the industry.

And in 2026, the results are telling a very different story than the prestige rankings.

Modernlawfirm
How the Tomatometer works
Rotten Tomatoes works because it aggregates. One critic might love a film and another might hate it, but pool 200 reviews and you get a signal that’s hard to fake.

We applied the same logic to law firms. The Tomatometer score for each firm is a weighted composite of five lawyer-centric data sources:

Source Weight What it measures
Vault Best Law Firms to Work For 2027 45% Direct associate ratings across 12 quality-of-life categories (50 firms ranked, survey Oct 2025–Jan 2026)
American Lawyer Midlevel Associates Survey 2025 25% 3rd–5th year associates at ~70 firms rate 12 satisfaction factors
AmLaw A-List 2025 15% Composite of associate satisfaction, pro bono, revenue per lawyer, and diversity (top 20 firms scored on 100-point scale)
BTI Associate Satisfaction A-Listers 2026 10% Independent survey of 5,000+ associate responses on mentoring, growth, and partner investment
Glassdoor + qualitative signals 5% Sentiment from public review sites, Reddit r/biglaw, Above the Law reporting
We deliberately excluded the Vault 100 prestige rankings, AmLaw 100 revenue tables, and Chambers practice rankings. Prestige and profitability are easy to measure and well documented elsewhere. The Tomatometer is about something rarer: what it feels like to actually work there.

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Mishcon’s Dubai Office Move

Best Firms, Big Law, Press Releases, UK Law / June 5, 2026

London-based Mishcon de Reya has opened a Dubai office in DWTC Free Zone marking the firm’s continued growth in the Middle East. The firm has offices in Singapore and an associated office in Hong Kong and continues to grow its globasl links in its specialist areas. The media statement announcing the latest move is below

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Milbank Breaks The Freeze And BigLaw’s 2026 Pay War Is Back On

Big Law Salary Scale, Law Firm Salary Scale / June 3, 2026

It took longer than anyone on r/biglaw thought possible, but the BigLaw salary scale has finally moved and, in news that will shock precisely nobody, Milbank is once again the firm doing the heavy lifting for everyone else’s associates. The firm has announced a new associate pay scale effective 1 July 2026, with raises ranging

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Winston Taylor Launches Another Big Law Brand

Big Law, Press Releases, US Law / June 2, 2026

Winston & Strawn and Taylor Wessing’s UK arm have now completed a full transatlantic combination with real scale, real intent, and, if the messaging holds, real integration. The newly minted “Winston Taylor” arrives not as another loose alliance but as a 1,400-lawyer operation spanning the US, UK, Europe and beyond. Whether this proves to be

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BigLaw’s AI Arms Race Just Escalated As Kirkland & Ellis Puts $500 Million Behind Its Own Generative AI Platform

Big Law / May 29, 2026

The legal tech arms race just moved up a weight class. Kirkland & Ellis, the world’s highest‑grossing law firm, has set aside an eye‑watering $500 million to build its own proprietary generative AI platform, rather than relying on the same off‑the‑shelf tools everyone else can buy.

The strategy, revealed by firm chair Jon Ballis and first reported by the Financial Times, marks a deliberate pivot away from simply licensing commercial software. Ballis says the firm expects to spend more than $100 million this year alone on custom AI services, with hundreds of millions more to follow over the next three to four years – roughly 1% of Kirkland’s annual revenue.

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Latham Raids MoFo London Boss in Tech-Heavy M&A Play

Big Law, Lawyers, UK Law / May 29, 2026

Latham & Watkins has hired a three-partner M&A and private equity team from Morrison & Foerster in London, led by MoFo’s former City boss Andrew Boyd, in a move that underlines the firm’s appetite for tech-heavy deal work and high-end public company mandates.

Boyd, previously managing partner of MoFo’s 60-lawyer London office, is joined by fellow partners Gary Brown and newly-minted partner Luke Rowland, all three decamping to Latham’s corporate bench in the City.
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Trainee To Equity Partner: The 12-Year BigLaw Timeline, Mapped Honestly

Big Law, Featured, Featured, Law Firms, Law Job News, US Law / May 24, 2026

Roughly one in twenty associates who start at a top US firm will make equity partner there.

That is the number nobody puts in the recruiting brochure. The brochure says the partnership track is “approximately eight to ten years.” That is technically true and practically misleading — because it describes the timeline of people who finish, not the probability of finishing.

The honest answer is that the BigLaw partnership track is a twelve-year funnel with five stages, four exit ramps, and a survival rate that would not pass muster as a clinical trial outcome.

Here is what each stage actually looks like.

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Kirkland & Ellis Forms Real Assets Group With 600 Lawyers

Big Law, Press Releases, US Law / May 18, 2026

Kirkland & Ellis LLP has formed a real assets practice group with more than 600 attorneys by combining areas such as real estate and infrastructure to align with industry trends and the needs of clients. Kirkland & Ellis said in a Friday press release that the integrated group brings the firm’s energy, materials and mining,

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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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