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 be the tenth most successful law firm." On this episode of our podcast, On The Merits, Washer spoke to Bloomberg Law editor Jessie Kokrda Kamens about what spurred the firm to start playing in the lateral recruiting market, look beyond its leveraged finance roots, and target new types of clients—particularly those with cryptocurrency interests. "Our loyalty has been and always will be, to a large degree, to the banks," Washer said. But a dip in bank activity in the leveraged finance space in 2023 took a bite out of Cahill's bottom line. "It caused us to sort of rethink the overall strategy that had worked so well for so long," he said. The firm bounced back last year, bringing in nearly $464 million in gross revenue and boosting profits per equity partner to $5.3 million. It also added partners in private credit, restructuring, and litigation, among other key practices. Washer would rather excel in the firm's core focus areas than try to be everything to every client. He's wary of expanding too quickly from a headcount of under 300 lawyers, both for business reasons and to preserve the firm's culture. "When a firm gets to 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 lawyers, no one person—no matter how successful they are—is really critical to the operation of the place," he said. This conversation is a part of our Leading Law Firms project, in which we score law firms using more than just traditional metrics like a firm's bottom line. Throughout the rest of this month, we'll be sharing more interviews with the leaders of other firms like DLA Piper and Susman Godfrey. Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

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 about what they learned on this episode of our podcast, On The Merits. She said this spring's stock market dip is likely contributing to more activity in this space because it allowed activist investors to purchase more of their target companies at discounted prices. Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

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 to see a lot more activity on this front and firms are reaping the financial benefits. Global deal volume for the first half of the year is up nearly 20% compared to the same time last year, and that includes Meta Platforms' $14 billion investment in Scale AI. In fact, deals involving AI, either directly or indirectly, have been driving a lot of the activity of the past few months, according to reporter Mahira Dayal, who crunched the numbers for Bloomberg Law's quarterly league tables. On this episode of our podcast, On The Merits, Mahira speaks to host Mike Leonard about this and other reasons why the deals market is rebounding after a slow start to the year why it's probably a little too early to start betting against Kirkland. Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

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 host Jessie Kamens. "You can't do that if you're a four or five hundred lawyer firm. It's pretty hard to do it if you're a 1,500 lawyer firm." This conversation is a part of our Leading Law Firms project, in which we score law firms using more than just traditional metrics like a firm's bottom line. Throughout the rest of this month, we'll be sharing more interviews with the leaders of other firms like Cahill Gordon & Reindell, DLA Piper, and Susman Godfrey. Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

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 legal operations professional group, and he joins our podcast, On The Merits, to talk about how the profession can still achieve diversity despite the DEI backlash, but why he thinks it will "get worse before it gets better." Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

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 exam alternative is not on the horizon, and large corporate firms have shown little willingness to hire attorneys licensed through these alternative programs, according to Bloomberg Law reporter Maia Spoto. Maia spoke to Jessie Kamens, the host of our On The Merits podcast, about how these programs work and why some advocates say we need to finally ditch the grueling, multi-day test. Maia also gets into what's happening in California, where the development of a new exam went disastrously wrong. Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

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 California, New York, and D.C. He also talks about the challenges of convincing the attorneys you want to hire that your national law firm is committed to their hometown. "When the people are looking to move, they really want to understand the firm that you are," Doogal said. "And sometimes there's a fear that, if a big law firm is coming into town, is it going to be more bureaucratic, is it going to be more centralized, is our culture going to change?" Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

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 they generate. The ads failed to disclose who was behind them as required by law and were quickly pulled after Siegel started asking questions about them. Siegel joins our podcast, On The Merits, to talk about the stakes of this anti-litigation finance legislation and the beef these groups have with litigation finance. Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

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 provide $40 million in free legal services on shared priority causes—in part to avoid a run on partners. On today's episode of our podcast, On The Merits, Bloomberg Law reporters Roy Strom and Justin Henry explain why this is a setback for Paul Weiss, but not a catastrophic one. They note that, thus far, only trial lawyers have departed the firm, leaving intact its ability to operate in the lucrative deals space. Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

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 reporter Tatyana Monnay talks about why Bondi tried to seize control of the DC bar and why his campaign drew so much attention. Also, her fellow reporter Sam Skolnik talks about how conservative attacks on the American Bar Association are hurting the century-old institution in serious and potentially existential way. Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.