The key legal and commercial skills law firms are competing for.

We get asked a version of the same question most weeks. Which practices are busy, and who inside them is actually movable. The first half of that is easy. The second is where most of the interesting hiring is sitting this year.

Partner mobility has not slowed. More than 3,200 partners joined Am Law 200 firms between January and September, which is already more than the whole of 2021. London is still active too. We logged 81 announced partner moves in July and August alone. Edwards Gibson had Paul Hastings and Shoosmiths at the top of the City table for the first half, with King & Spalding, Latham and Eversheds not far behind. Volume on its own does not tell you much. The useful question is what those firms thought they were buying.

In London it is still private capital, and the moves are quite specific. Kirkland took Will Aitken-Davies from Paul Weiss in April. He had joined Paul Weiss from Linklaters in 2023 as head of European M&A, and he acts for sponsors including KPS, General Atlantic and TDR. Paul Weiss had built a lot of its London story around that hire. Kirkland hiring him back says less about either firm’s strategy and more about how few people at that level the market actually rates. Simpson Thacher’s October move for six Weil partners, including London secondaries partners Simon Saitowitz and Charles Cooper-Isow, is the same logic in a different product. Secondaries, GP stakes and sponsor advisory are where a lot of capital is being raised and recycled at the moment. A corporate partner without that angle is a harder sell than the title suggests.

Infrastructure is the sector version of it. Paul Weiss hired Paul Foote from Simpson Thacher in January to lead European infrastructure M&A. His practice had been built around EQT, Blackstone, KKR and Stonepeak, across energy transition and digital infrastructure. Data-centre laterals across the Am Law 200 are running ahead of last year, which was itself a record: 191 partner hires with that experience in the first eight months, and London and New York are the two cities that keep coming up. Firms are not really hiring “energy lawyers”. They want people who have documented offtake, grid connection and the financing under a powered site. In the US, energy was one of the few practices to show a clear partner-level net gain in June, mostly renewables, storage and transmission.

New York has its own version of the same hire. Linklaters taking Mark Gordon from Wachtell in September, as managing partner of the Americas and co-chair of global M&A, is a Magic Circle firm buying US public-company capability it does not have enough of. Linklaters has eight M&A partners in the US and 51 in London. That gap is the brief. Cravath taking a five-partner M&A team from Weil the same month, and Gibson Dunn taking William Savitt from Wachtell in July, sit in the same category. These are not

speculative bets. They are purchases of a relationship and a way of practising, and the associate hiring follows behind them.

That is the associate market as we are seeing it. Demand usually shows up within a quarter of the partner arriving. A three-to-six-year lawyer who has owned a workstream on a sponsor deal, dealt with local counsel and spoken to the client without a partner on the call is getting conversations. Someone who has only marked up documents in the middle of a process is finding it slower, however tidy the CV. In finance we keep hearing the same test: can they connect the covenant package to the equity story. In funds and secondaries it is simpler. Have they closed. In disputes, King & Spalding hiring Gary Born’s eight-partner arbitration team from WilmerHale in June is a useful marker. The senior market wants people who have already run a case.

AI has not reordered any of this. Firms are staffing data, cybersecurity and AI governance, and a few have built internal groups to push tools into live matters. We are not seeing a premium for an associate who can use the tool. We are seeing a premium for judgment, including the judgment to know when the output is wrong. The cross-border requirement has not softened either. London desks at US firms still need English-qualified lawyers who can sit next to New York, and capital markets still needs someone who understands the US securities overlay.

The lawyers moving this year can usually point to a short list of recent matters, say what they did on them, and name the client. The firms writing the cheques are the ones staffing benches under partners hired in the last twelve months, at Kirkland, Paul Weiss, Simpson Thacher, Latham, and at the Magic Circle teams that have decided the US is no longer something they can leave to a referral.