Featured – Page 3

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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Legora Hires Atlassian CMO Star To Sell AI To Sceptical Lawyers

Featured, Legal AI / May 22, 2026

Tom Borman Lawyers are trained to pull apart arguments, not sign up for AI hype. Swedish legal AI startup Legora has just hired someone whose job is to change that, according to a report from BusinessInsider. The company has appointed former Atlassian marketing leader Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir as its first chief marketing officer, handing her

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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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UK Law – Private Wealth Law Firm Gets Richer

Featured, Press Releases, UK Law / May 19, 2026

Private wealth lawyers Boodle Hatfield have announced that it is set to hit £49.5m revenue this year – marking the firm’s second consecutive year of double-digit growth. The results for the London-based firm come off the back of a strategic focus on private capital for the firm, which has doubled its revenue in a decade.

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UK Platform Law Firm Setfords Eyes £110m+ Exit as PE-Backed Consultant Model Proves Its Worth

Featured, Law Firms, UK Law / May 19, 2026

Private equity-backed Setfords Solicitors has appointed investment bankers to explore strategic options including a potential sale that could fetch well north of £110 million, according to reports from The Sunday Times. The Guildford-based firm, which pioneered the consultant lawyer platform model in the UK, has grown revenues by 35% to £67.7 million over the past

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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 Many Lawyers Are in the US? (2026 Statistics)

Briefings, Featured, Featured, Law Firms, Lawyers, Legal Pay Watch, Power Briefs, Power List, US Law / May 14, 2026

1,374,720 Active Lawyers in 2026 – Salaries, Demographics, State Rankings & BigLaw Trends Sonia Hickey, LawFuel contributing editor Knowing how many lawyers are in the US tells you more than just a headcount. It shows where the legal job market is heating up, how the profession is shifting demographically, what new graduates can realistically expect

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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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Neal Katyal, Harvey AI and the Supreme Court TED‑Gate

Featured, Lawyers, Legal AI / May 11, 2026

Neal Katyal, the superstar legal hotshot, set off a minor legal‑Twitter firestorm by posting a victory‑lap tweet and TED‑talk teaser crediting a bespoke AI tool, “Harvey,” with helping him win the Supreme Court tariffs case—a bit of self‑branding that many lawyers found tone‑deaf and over‑the‑top. A subsequent reader poll by David Lat found roughly 70

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MinterEllison Slashing Graduate Jobs: Is AI Replacing Junior Lawyers?

Australia Law News, Featured, Law Firms, Legal AI, MinterEllisonRuddWatts, New Zealand Law News / May 11, 2026

AI is Eating the Entry-level Lunch For years, partners have whispered about how many juniors they actually need if a machine can read 10,000 documents in an hour. This week, MinterEllison in Australia stopped whispering and started acting. The firm has effectively put the Australian legal market on notice, slashing its 2025-26 graduate intake by

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