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Big Law’s Trump Reprieve Lasts Less Than 24 Hours — The U-Turn That Changed Everything

Big Law, Headlining, US Law /
Biglaw chess

It has been a year — twelve months of watching the most powerful law firms on the planet twist in the wind at the pleasure of a sitting president. And just when it looked like the drama had finally resolved itself, Washington reminded everyone that in this administration, nothing is ever quite over.

On Monday, the Trump administration quietly announced it was abandoning its executive orders against Jenner & Block, Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey — four firms that had the nerve, and the litigation chops, to fight back. All four had beaten the orders in the lower courts.

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Is This The Death of Lockstep Pay for BigLaw?

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Biglawpay reset

For decades, BigLaw partnership compensation had the reassuring predictability of a Swiss watch. Progress through lockstep. Accumulate seniority. Collect your reward. Repeat.

That model isn’t dead. But the announcement in February 2026 that Freshfields, the world’s 13th largest firm by gross revenue, and an institution that maintained an all-equity partnership for its entire existence, was introducing a nonequity partner tier while simultaneously stretching its lockstep to reward higher earners at the top of the pay scale, made something abundantly clear.

The Pay Reset is Now

Freshfields isn’t alone. Cravath created a salaried partner tier in November 2023, and that move gave other highly-ranked firms permission to follow suit — Paul Weiss, WilmerHale, Cleary, Skadden, Debevoise, and Sullivan & Cromwell have all introduced nonequity tiers in the two years since.

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Macfarlanes’ Curious New York Move: A Manhattan Office With No U.S. Law

Headlining, Power Firms, US Law /
Macfarlanes lawfuel

Macfarlanes Opens Manhattan Office – With a Deliberately Limited Mission Macfarlanes is joining the steady procession of London firms establishing a presence in New York. But unlike the usual BigLaw expansion playbook, the firm insists it has no intention of practising U.S. law. Instead, the profile City firm is opening what it calls a “representative

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Personal Injury Law Powerhouses – The Overlooked Business Geniuses Crushing Big Law

Headlining, Law Firms /
Property deal

Snobbery alert: while Big Law partners chase prestige, lockstep compensation, and sky-high billable-hour targets, those flashy “billboard lawyers” at personal injury firms like Morgan & Morgan are quietly running the smartest, most scalable legal businesses in America. And the data proves it.

Morgan & Morgan isn’t just big (as LawFuel has previously reported) it’s the largest personal injury firm in the country, with over 1,000 attorneys (ranking 42nd overall on the 2025 NLJ 500 and 34th on the Law360 400), offices in every state, and more than $30 billion recovered for 700,000+ clients.

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Law Firm Marketing in 2026: What Stopped Working and What Replaced It

Headlining, Law Firms, Law Marketing /
Lawfirmmarketing 7tipstosaveyourfirm

Let’s be honest with each other for a moment.

You didn’t go to law school to become a content creator. You went because you’re sharp, you like solving problems, and — let’s be real — the billing rates don’t exactly hurt. But here you are in 2026, staring down a marketing landscape that looks absolutely nothing like it did three years ago, while some LinkedIn bro in a blazer-and-jeans combo tells you to “post consistently or die.”

You’re not dying because you’re bad at marketing. You’re struggling because the rulebook got shredded and nobody sent you the memo.

Here’s what’s actually happening: clients are asking ChatGPT “what happens to the house if we divorce?” before they ever type your name into Google. Your lovingly crafted blog post — the one your firm spent four hours approving — is sitting underneath an AI summary that answers the question completely and sends precisely zero traffic your way. And the referral you were counting on last month?

That client quietly asked an AI about you first. It didn’t go well.

The numbers bear this out, and they’re not comfortable reading. AI Overviews are slashing organic click-through rates by somewhere between 58 and 61 percent the moment they appear on a results page (Seer Interactive, September 2025; Ahrefs, December 2025).

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Mishcon de Reya – From Mandelson Brief to Battle Stations

Headlining, Law Firms, UK Law /
Mandelson arrest - lawfuel - Image: ABC

For the law firm managing the defence of Peter Mandleson — Mishcon de Reya — today’s arrest represents a decisive escalation. What began as a high-profile reputation management brief has become one of the most significant criminal defence instructions in the firm’s history.

Mishcon de Reya was first reported to be representing Mandelson by The Lawyer earlier this month, with Johanna Walsh (pictured) head of the firm’s white-collar crime and investigations practice, leading the team.

The choice of Walsh, recognised by Legal 500 as a first-tier practitioner in serious and organised crime and by Who’s Who Legal as a Global Leader in Investigations, signalled from the outset that Mandelson and his advisers anticipated criminal exposure well before today’s arrest.

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Royal Reckoning – The Legal Anatomy of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s Arrest

Headlining, UK Law /
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor; Image - Reuters

LawFuel Law Briefing – In what legal historians are already calling a watershed moment, a former member of the British royal family was arrested, questioned for 11 hours, and released under investigation — all on his 66th birthday. For lawyers, the procedural and substantive law at play here is as significant as the headlines. The

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How Brad Karp Lost the Plot: David Lat’s Forensic Dissection of the Paul Weiss Chairman’s Downfall

Headlining, LawStars, Lawyers, US Law /
Karp & Epstein: Source: Daily Mail

BigLaw • Analysis The Karp Collapse: David Lat Dissects the Emails That Ended an Era at Paul Weiss Five takeaways from Brad Karp’s Epstein correspondence—and what BigLaw should learn from this masterclass in how not to manage a client relationship By LawFuel Staff • February 16, 2026 When the DOJ released millions of Jeffrey Epstein

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Legal Market Analysis – BigLaw’s Lateral Frenzy Is Reshaping the Market

Big Law, Headlining, US Law /
biglaw talent

The Perkins Coie exodus in Seattle signals a permanent shift in the lateral hiring labor market that is changing the way top law firms operate. Lateral hiring is no longer just a tactic but an entire business model.

When Perkins Coie lost lawyers to the announcement new offices for Morrison Foerster and McGuireWoods. It was in fact a signal of something structural.

The departures came as Perkins Coie prepares for its merger with Ashurst, a combination that will create a global platform of roughly 3,000 lawyers. The timing reveals a pattern that now defines elite legal practice: mergers create opportunity, but they also create instability. And instability is oxygen for competitors.

What we are witnessing is not a phase. It is the emergence of lateral acquisition as BigLaw’s dominant growth strategy.

The New Economics: Why Firms Are Buying Revenue

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