Even Texas’s transformation into a financial industry hub, drawing companies from corporate strongholds like New York and Delaware and fueling the development of three stock exchanges, hasn’t changed that: The state’s securities industry has been dubbed “Y’all Street,” in a nod to (and a play on) Manhattan’s Wall Street.

It’s an environment that makes Skadden’s more than 30 years in Houston the kind of asset even Texas money can’t buy, something the megafirms now arriving in Space City (population 2.3M and climbing) are unable to replicate.

“It’s important to be able to say to clients, ‘We know this market, we know this region, we know the oil patch, we know the businesses that you’re in,’” says Noelle Reed, the head of both Skadden’s Houston office and its growing litigation practice. The office’s expansion is a key reason for its recent move to a state-of-the-art headquarters at Texas Tower, a 47-story building in downtown Houston that opened in 2021.

“In the last three years, we have nearly tripled the number of attorneys in the Houston office,” Reed explains. Today, in addition to associates, the Houston office has three litigation partners: Reed, Michelle Scheffler, who joined in 2024, and Abby Davis, who leads hiring for the office.

Time to Move

“We’re still a little undersized for our market and for the size of the office, so I’d expect, in the next couple of years, to see the litigation practice continue to grow,” Reed adds. “We’re always looking for great people, and we will always take the opportunity to interview people whom we think are going to strengthen our litigation base.”

Connections with prospects have occurred organically, more often than not, as they did with Davis, who was based in the firm’s New York office and worked closely with Reed and the Houston litigation team on a few cases, including one headed to a jury trial.

She jibed so well with them that one night over dinner, more than two years ago, Reed broached the topic of relocation.

“You’d never think of moving to Houston, would you?” she asked Davis, who had recently made partner in New York. “My reply was, ‘Let’s talk about it and what that might look like,’” Davis says. “And the rest is history.”

The daughter of a trial lawyer, Davis grew up outside Boston and spent her summers as an undergraduate working with her father, which solidified her plans to go to law school. After earning her Juris Doctor from the University of Kentucky, she focused on New York law firms and was particularly intrigued by the training and mentorship opportunities at Skadden, which was founded in the mid-20^th century and built an early reputation handling proxy fights and hostile takeovers.

“I’ve worked with people who are absolutely at the top of their game and who are always willing to look out for opportunities for more junior people,” Davis says. “Being able to get pushed out of my comfort zone, take that deposition, do that argument, was critical to my ability to grow as a lawyer.”

Davis has spent her entire career at Skadden, and the breadth of her experiences has equipped her for a role on a team whose members are often described as the Swiss Army knives of lawyers, possessing the tools to handle any case.

The Houston litigation practice is broad, the partners say, and frequently involves “parachuting in” on cases that the parties and other law firms were unable to resolve through negotiation.

Up in the Air

“Only 11 percent of cases actually go to trial,” Scheffler says, “and that includes personal injury cases, which means a very, very small number of true commercial cases are actually tried. Often, clients don’t think they’re going to get there and then have an ‘aha’ moment where they realize, ‘We’re actually doing this,’ and they want somebody experienced in the courtroom who’s done it before. Our group provides that. We put on Superman’s cape and get ready in three weeks, or however long it is that we have.”

Reed’s favorite memory of parachuting in dates to the early 2000s, when she and litigation partners from other Skadden offices were rushed to California to defend a newspaper in a class-action suit filed by paper carriers – five days before trial.

“About 10 partners from around the firm and all of our associates from Houston at the time packed our bags and relocated to Los Angeles and dug in, 24/7, for months,” says Reed, who had five-month-old triplets at the time. “I flew out at 5 a.m. every Monday morning for months and months and flew home on Thursday nights; court was dark on Fridays.”

“That sounds terrible, but for a trial lawyer, it’s the greatest thing in the world,” she explains. “It really is. We all looked at each other the day before trial after running ourselves ragged trying to master the material, interview all the witnesses and make sure that we were prepared and said, ‘If we win this case, we are the greatest trial lawyers in America, and if we lose this case, we might still be the second greatest.”

Often, clients don’t think they’re going to get [to trial] and then have an ‘aha’ moment where they realize, ‘We’re actually doing this,’ and they want somebody experienced in the courtroom who’s done it before. Our group provides that.

Not every lawyer would react to the challenging demands of such a situation with Reed’s enthusiasm. The ones who do are the attorneys Davis looks for as a hiring partner.

“Having that kind of can-do, proactive attitude, that willingness to do what’s necessary to give the best client service is the hallmark of a Skadden lawyer,” she explains. “It’s critical, but it’s hard to tease out during the interview process, so what I’ve tried to do over the years is figure out the best questions to identify those people who will do anything for the team and really just want to dig in.”

Grit and Grid

Another factor that’s key to success is grit.

“In litigation, one of the great things is that you can win,” Davis says. “One of the hard things is that you can lose. When you go into that argument and you are 100 percent certain – because you have to be, by the time you get to the podium – that you are right and you are going to win and you don’t, it’s a blow. Being able to dust yourself off, get back up and do the best for the client and win at that next turn without getting deterred is a critical ability to have as a litigator.”

While the Houston litigators maintain a heavy commercial caseload, they also take on matters outside that realm, including bankruptcies and a significant amount of securities cases.

Whatever the field, there are no run-of-the-mill trials.

“We handle more than your typical simple breach-of-contract cases,” says Scheffler, who dreamed as a child of working as an actress or a geologist, eventually combining the two interests by becoming a trial lawyer with an energy focus. “We excel at handling true bet-the-company cases, where the company is on the operating room table, bleeding out, and they call us. When you’re a trial lawyer, not only is that really, really exciting, but it’s also really challenging, and it’s what sets us apart as a practice group and as a firm.”

As Houston is the heart of the U.S. energy industry, changes in prices of commodities such as oil and gas as well as regulatory shifts are regular influencers in the types of cases clients bring, says Scheffler, who has 20 years of experience in the field.

The demand for energy continues to grow, with data centers and AI helping drive the market. As a result of rapid growth and high demand there comes an increase in litigation over energy infrastructure.

“There’s increased demand for energy across the country and obviously here in Texas as well, so you’re going to see disputes related to that,” Scheffler explains.

In securities litigation, meanwhile, courts are still processing cases from the Covid-19 pandemic along with suits related to environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices and claims involving cryptocurrencies as well as artificial intelligence. As use of commercial AI has increased, so have lawsuits related to the accuracy of corporate disclosures about the technology, Reed says.

We excel at handling true bet-the-company cases, where the company is on the operating room table, bleeding out, and they call us.

Though Reed, Scheffler and Davis each have areas of particular interest and expertise, they’re also generalists, able to try a variety of cases and adept in mastering new subjects. The team’s caseload is split almost evenly between plaintiff and defense matters.

“Having the experience of doing both is really valuable,” Reed says. “The hardest thing for people who do mostly defense work when they get on the plaintiffs’ side is to push a case forward. There’s a joke on the defense side that when nothing’s happening, nothing bad is happening. Plaintiffs are often freer to move and move quickly.”

What’s the Why?

A former federal prosecutor, Reed enjoys the opportunity to play offense that comes with plaintiffs’ litigation. And she’s also aware of the edge that comes from practicing on both sides of the V.

As a defense lawyer, she says, cross-training helps gauge the plaintiff’s next move more accurately.

“All three of us approach our cases with trial in mind,” she says. “There’s a different way to prepare a case when you’re thinking about how it will ultimately look, not just in summary judgment papers but live in front of a jury or a judge when you try it.”

That requires a willingness to explore new techniques and strategies, contrary to the stereotype of Big Law attorneys as staid practitioners reluctant to depart from traditional methods.

“To be successful standing in front of a judge or a jury telling your client’s story requires not only academic expertise but also the ability to employ elements of both theater and knife-fighting,” Scheffler explains.

Successful litigators are “able to anticipate the questions that are going to be lingering in a judge’s mind or a jury’s mind,” Davis adds. “It’s not just, ‘What do the documents say?’ and ‘What are the facts?’ but also ‘What’s the why? What’s the motivation behind it? Why did things happen the way that they happened?’ and filling in those blanks. Or, even better, laying out the groundwork so that the jury or the judge can piece that together themselves, which is sometimes more convincing to the juror than just telling them the story. If they get to put that final piece in place, then they found it out for themselves.”

To be successful standing in front of a judge or a jury telling your client’s story requires not only academic expertise but also the ability to employ elements of both theater and knife-fighting.

Scheffler often compares litigation practice to a giant game of chess. “Every single day involves strategizing how to best position your client for the most successful outcome at trial or the most successful settlement that you can achieve that’s aligned with their business goals,” she says.

Reed agrees.

“Years ago, somebody asked me, ‘Is every case winnable?’ she recalls. “And my answer was, ‘Yes, if you define a win correctly.’ And that's really a core part of what we do with our clients. You can't just say, ‘There's a complaint filed, and we have to go to trial and win the case.’ You really have to understand your client's business, what that case means for them and all the nuance around it. Is this going to involve your CEO sitting in depositions? Is this going to involve your management team being distracted? Is this going to involve your core technology and put it at risk? What is litigating this case going to do to customer relationships, to vendor relationships? Are they going to get dragged into the litigation?

“As much as I love trials and a trial is sometimes the right answer for clients, it's not always the right answer,” Reed adds. “The really critical part of what we all do is work with our clients to define at the outset, ‘What does a win look like for you?’ and then find the fastest, most cost-effective path to that win.”

They are the omnipotents of oil, the governors of gas, the lionesses of LNG, the emperors of electric and the wizards of wind.

They litigate disputes from pipeline accidents to international incidents, create the economic foundation for massive projects in traditional and new energy sources, and handle a maze of regulation and investigations.

D.J. Beaty is co-chair of the renowned Oil & Gas Practice Group at Haynes Boone in Houston. He litigates upstream disputes in oil and gas, and has handled matters throughout the U.S. He has defended a client in a $240M lawsuit over development of a Texas oil field, limiting damages to less than 1 percent sought by the international partner. He also obtained reversal of a multimillion-dollar judgment in a title dispute regarding interests in three Oklahoma horizontal wells, among many other achievements.

Lauren Anderson is global vice chair of Latham & Watkins' Energy & Infrastructure Industry Group. Based in Houston, she handles private equity deals, M&A and other corporate matters throughout the energy industry – from traditional oil and gas to renewables and infrastructure. She has advised on numerous billion-dollar deals, including Pembina Pipeline in its acquisition of Kinder Morgan Canada, which transports petroleum products, and the U.S. portion of the Cochin Pipeline from Kinder Morgan; and Hess Midstream Partners in its $6.2B acquisition of Hess Infrastructure Partners, a midstream oil and gas company.

Patricia Tiller is a leading global authority on LNG (liquified natural gas) based in Bracewell’s Dubai office. She has helped shape LNG projects across six continents, handling long-term LNG sale and purchase agreements, LNG time charter parties, and terminal use arrangements for import and export facilities. She has advised on multiple first-of-their-kind floating and onshore projects helping clients navigate novel commercial structures, technical interfaces and cross-border risk profiles. She also has market-leading experience in upstream oil and gas transactions across Asia, the Middle East and Africa, advising governments, national oil companies, international oil companies and independent E&Ps.

We selected The Energy 500 from our well-honed methodology combining independent research, peer discussion and our nomination platform.

This is our fifth edition of The Lawdragon 500 Global Leaders in Energy. It was first published as part of The Lawdragon 500 Leading Environmental & Energy Lawyers in 2021.

Members of the Hall of Fame are denoted with an asterisk. 

The rise of artificial intelligence has created a whole new category of tech startups that cater to the legal world, addressing everything from drafting contracts to preparing deposition questions. According to the American Bar Association, 69 percent of legal professionals now use general-purpose AI tools, a dramatic increase from the 31 percent reported in 2025.

But as serial entrepreneur Patrick Ip dove into the legal AI space, he noticed something: He kept finding tools that benefitted the plaintiffs’ side – but not the defense. Ip responded, forming Palo Alto, Calif.-based Theo Ai in 2024 with Alex Alben, one of Ip’s professors at UCLA School of Law. “We saw that AI had captured a lot of imagination in the legal space,” Ip recalls.

Ip came to AI through a somewhat circuitous route, obtaining a master’s degree in legal studies at UCLA Law before working for Google as a business innovation and global product lead, where his team developed a Nobel Peace Prize-nominated project. He then founded Catalog, a consumer software platform, prior to initially launching Theo Ai as a “predictive,” plaintiffs’-side tool designed to forecast the values of settlements and litigation outcomes.

Lately, however, the company has expanded into filling that defense-side gap – providing AI solutions for and collaboration with defense firms and corporate counsel. The platform delivers intelligence on, among other things, trends across cases and cost trajectories. “We can look at your last thousand settlements and see what you generally settled this type of case for and present those numbers,” Ip says. Rather than the prompt-based, chat-style functions a large language model like ChatGPT, Theo Ai provides a unified look at case summary, plaintiff and defense strengths, discovery photos, medical chronology, budgets and billing in one dashboard, integrated into applications lawyers already use. The prompts are built into the programming, which Ip says helps prevent mistakes – like hallucinations – due to user error.

Of course, many are wary of AI and the implications of lawyers relying on a developing technology. So, Ip is working to pair that tech savvy with institutional legal knowledge. Theo Ai recently announced the formation of a Mass Tort Defense Advisory Board, which includes such legal luminaries as O.J. Simpson defense attorney Robert Shapiro. “One of the areas that we spend much of our time on is the most complex litigation,” Ip explains – making the new advisory board a necessary addition to the company’s other support arms, including its General Counsel Advisory Board and its AI Advisory Board.

Ip spoke recently to Lawdragon about the evolution of legal AI and Theo’s contribution to it.

Lawdragon: Can you start by talking a bit about your background?

Patrick Ip: The short version is that I worked previously at Google, where I was drafted on a project called Billion Acts, which was then nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2015 and 2016. After Google, I had a [software] company, Catalog, which unfortunately we had to shut down because of Covid. After Catalog, [I went] to law school as the next phase of trying to figure out what to do.

LD: What interested you about the law?

PI: I did mock trial in high school and I've always had an interest in the law. I never saw myself as a lawyer, but UCLA Law School reached out to me. It was actually great to be in an academic learning environment as opposed to a work environment where you're like, "Got to meet deadlines."

LD: What got you involved in artificial intelligence?

PI: At UCLA, one of my professors was Alex Alben. We wrote a whole bunch of papers on AI and the law and I founded Theo Ai with him. We saw that AI had captured a lot of imagination in the legal space but most of the money had gone to the plaintiff side. I would say about $700M has been deployed into plaintiff-side technology. Companies like Justpoint and Darrow scan social media to find opportunities for mass tort litigation.

We actually started on the plaintiff side doing prediction for lawsuits. Most cases are settled outside of court, and that data is private. So if you're trying to build a legal prediction engine, you can't because there's no publicly available data. Where we got our start is we worked with a whole bunch of litigation funders who had a lot of data on settlements. They needed help being able to price what was going on. And off of that, we were able to raise an early round of $7M in capital.

What we realized is that plaintiffs are highly coordinated. They have a lot of legal technology. But on the defense side they don't coordinate, they don't have a lot of technology, they don’t share settlement data. So we decided to cross the chasm to the defense side. 

LD: Defense firms, including Big Law, can be traditional and reluctant to make changes. Have you seen that attitude shift in the last couple of years and how do you introduce yourself to a firm that might be hesitant?

PI: I think the defense side now realizes there's a need to collaborate more. When we talk to them, I ask them, "Do you work with other GCs when you're getting sued to get advice on what to do?" The answer generally is “No.” They're used to working in a much more siloed manner. But if I ask, "Do you want to work more closely with other folks that are also getting sued?” the answer is generally “Yes.” And so there's this desire to be more collaborative, and Theo is kind of that glue to help folks get more collaborative.

Another way we approach potential clients is that if you're a GC or head of litigation, you can remember your last 10 settlements, but you're not going to remember your last thousand. A use case for us is to use AI to help corporations not only get more organized internally but also work with defense-side counsel.

There's this desire [on the defense side] to be more collaborative, and Theo is kind of that glue.

LD: So you are seeing companies being able to understand their own history and their own work better?

PI: That's correct. And one of the other things we point to is it's not just the number of lawsuits that's increasing; the number of pages is increasing. AI can generate 30-, 3,000-, 300,000-page lawsuits. Someone still has to read it, understand it, decide if it’s real or fabricated. That's a huge burden on the defense side. No human can read 25 million pages realistically. That becomes a great use case for what we do. In essence, we connect to folks' emails, enterprise systems, and then their files and we automatically sort and organize their cases.

LD: Why is your sort of technology necessary? Why can’t a lawyer just use ChatGPT if they want to use an AI model?

PI: A lot of corporates are asking about ChatGPT. Our take is that LLMs [large language models] are good for single-contract review. But we're concerned with litigation scale. So 25 million pages, you can't put that in ChatGPT. It just won't work. And then there’s also the complexity. We work with a lot of pharma companies who deal with a lot of medical records. If you put a medical record into an LLM, it will say, "The documents you uploaded far exceed what I can handle." We've built our system both to handle large scale and high complexity.

AI can generate 30-, 3,000-, 300,000-page lawsuits. Someone still has to read it, understand it, decide if it’s real or fabricated. That's a huge burden on the defense side.

LD: Interesting. Then, How do you integrate Theo with a client’s other applications such as Workday?

PI: One of the things that we're trying to do is create what is called “single pane.” Workday has information when it comes to employment litigation that lawyers need, Legal Tracker is used a lot for financial billing, NetDocs for documents. It’s time-consuming to switch between systems to find everything. That delays justice for everybody. And so what we're trying to build is one system for everything. We can use AI to read everything, connect to all the systems and bring it all together.

LD: Can you talk a bit about the evolution of Theo?

PI: We built this website for legal prediction, and we went to all these people and they're like, "Yeah, it'd be so awesome if we had this website where we could upload our lawsuit and get a prediction of what is going to happen." We built it, we launched it and then no one signed in. And we were like, "Why didn't you log in?" What we learned was that the friction of just going to something else made it really hard, even if it was valuable, for lawyers when they're juggling so many different things to just adopt a new platform. So then we were like, "Oh, let's plug into your case management system. We'll just pull the litigation and just give you the insights and data layer there." And what we learned from that experience is that the case management system was just never up to date. Then we asked, "So where is everything?" And they told us, "Email." So our early product was actually just returning predictions straight into users’ inboxes. We get access to all their litigation in the email. It's still one of the core unique factors for us. You just forward your litigation to our intake inbox.

LD: Can you give an example of how this works?

PI: So when it's a slip and fall case, you want to be able to see a photo of what actually happened. Normally if you're an attorney, you have to go through the email, you got to find the attachment, or if you have a document system, you go through the document system to figure that out. Again, it's the friction of going someplace else. We're bringing it all in one spot. We also make it easy to find the incident report or the witness statement. Generally when these come in, it's gibberish in terms of the title and we make it searchable and useful and structured.

LD: Where is your prediction solution today?

PI: Again, most cases settle. So we were trying to figure out, "What's this going to settle for?" But as we've matured and progressed, what law firms and GCs on the corporate side really want to know is, "If I settle, what is that amount going to be? And then if I go to trial, how much is that going to cost me?" Because we're parsing invoice data, we can say, "We know that for this matter, you typically go with this law firm. We understand these rates for these law firms and we know how long these cases generally last. This is how much we think this is going to cost you." But we can also look at your last thousand settlements and see what you generally settled this type of case for and present those numbers. That is something that I don't think anyone has had before.

LD: How did the mass tort advisory board come about?

PI: We have our GC advisory board; we have our AI advisory board. The mass tort was a newer one that we formed because one of the areas that we spend much of our time on is the most complex litigation. Folks like Bob Shapiro and other law firm partners can say, "Hey, this is something that's much needed." We can get to insights faster with trusted brand names. Also, there's so many different sub-areas in law, like real estate, probate; employment has 20 different sub-verticals. There's no way that we can be the experts on everything, so the advisory board allows us to expand our counsel when it comes to developing each of our practice areas.

We have Sandie Leung, the former chief legal officer of Bristol Myers Squibb, on the board. Pharma is one of our big areas, and we have someone who can say, "These are the things that you should make sure that you have in mind." We have former employment lawyers like Ross Bogdan, who's the former GC at Lucid.

LD: What are the hotspot practice areas that you're seeing?

PI: General liability and employment are probably the top two most voluminous in terms of just actual number of matters. The most complex are usually pharma and medical devices and medical malpractice. Medical records are generally extremely long and tedious, and a lot of medical records are handwritten notes. So we had to build a [character recognition] system that was going to be able to read and understand all the handwritten notes. The messier the handwriting too, the longer it takes for people to digest. Theo can read all these things and understand what's going on.

In medical cases, we're looking for discrepancies between what the plaintiffs have put together and what the actual evidence says. Generally, this work is done manually by a human where you have to read the plaintiff's side, they have to remember what the plaintiff said, then they have to go read the medical records and find out where the discrepancies are. Obviously in many cases, the story does line up and that's great. We can get those settled faster. For the ones that have discrepancies, let's isolate that.

One other thing that we do is find the trends and patterns. Generally speaking, the defense law firm and the counsel, they're like, "Patrick, we would have to read a thousand of these files to understand any sort of trends and patterns, right?” There's like 20 different people reading all these records. But with AI, we have one "reviewer" of all the information, so there's consistency in how things are being reviewed. Pointing to fraud, one of the things that we see is multiple plaintiffs who use the same phone number and the same email. Those need to be filtered out.

LD: What are the developments in AI that are really exciting to you right now and how do you hope to incorporate those into your offerings?

PI: Our ability to better read medical records, better understand all the documents, better find trends – these are all net positives. We also feel like, "OK, even if the LLMs were able to do this work, they wouldn't have the data that corporates are giving us to properly benchmark and understand what's going on." I think that will always give us a bit of an edge.

Before Kathryn Borgeson touches a transaction, she draws a picture.

Boxes. Arrows. Lines connecting lenders to borrowers to entities to assets, laid out on paper until the structure of the deal becomes something she can actually see. It’s not a personality quirk or affectation. It’s how she thinks and how she protects deals.

"I'm super visual," she says. "I need to see the actual steps and how it all works out."

In seventeen years at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, Borgeson has been drawing versions of that picture across some of the most complex financial transactions in the market. As a partner in the firm's bankruptcy structuring group, her job is not to litigate matters when things fall apart. Nor can she guarantee total protection when they do. What she can do is lay the foundation to minimize the risk. She works across Cadwalader's practice groups – real estate, structured finance, back leverage – while everyone else is focused on closing deals, she’s spotting the holes and the exposure, advising on the bankruptcy implications of each high-stakes transaction.

"You can never prevent a borrower from filing for bankruptcy," she says. "So, we do the next best thing. We make it as ‘bankruptcy remote’ as possible." She pauses. "We don't say proof. That would be going too far."

THE LONG WAY TO THE LAW

Borgeson grew up outside Washington, DC, went to Villanova and graduated with a finance degree and no particular plan for the law. She only knew she didn't want to pursue finance in New York — too much, too fast – so she came back to DC and did something that, in retrospect, turned out to be the best legal education she never intended to get. She went into business with her brothers.

Her older brother whom she describes as “very techie” was running a small low voltage wiring business and wanted to build it out beyond “a guy in a truck.” Borgeson brought her freshly minted undergraduate degree to the table and came on board to handle the finance side – getting the infrastructure in place, setting up systems and building reports. She was good at it. And then, once it was running smoothly, she was bored by it.

"The fun part was building it," she says. "Once it was in place, I thought, this is going to be boring."

The business had a lawyer who handled whatever came up – employment claims, contracts, the steady drumbeat of small-business legal friction. Borgeson was their primary contact and somewhere in those conversations, something clicked.

"There was always a problem to solve," she says. "I thought, this stuff is way more interesting."

She started law school at night close to home at The George Washington University while still working with her brothers, transitioning fully to a legal career halfway through. She graduated into a job at a boutique white-collar litigation firm, where she learned to draft motions, do legal research and move fast – skills that would matter more than she could’ve imagined when she arrived as a summer associate at Cadwalader in 2009.

2009 was not the best year to be a summer associate for Wall Street’s oldest law firm. Or any financial firm.

“THE ASYLUM”

The historic financial crisis that began in 2008 was still very much in progress when Borgeson walked through Cadwalader's doors, and the firm was neck deep in it. The Lehman Brothers bankruptcy – at the time the largest in American history – was generating a volume of claims work that consumed entire teams. Cadwalader was also advising the U.S. Treasury on the General Motors and Chrysler bankruptcies as well as serving as debtors’ counsel in the Lyondell Chemical collapse, one of the biggest bankruptcies of its kind. Armed with a finance degree and a white-collar litigation background, Borgeson’s summer associateship started immediately in the deep end of the pool.

If one aspect of it doesn't work, we present alternatives. We come up with solutions to preserve the commercial deal, even if we have to structure it a little bit differently.

The daily reality was endless motions. With Lehman, it was systematic objections to thousands of claims – missing signatures, valuation disputes, deal documents that didn't quite say what the claimant thought they said. The goal was to knock claims off the docket wholesale. Borgeson and her colleagues had narrow windows to respond, filing objections to the objections, making their case in writing, negotiating where they could and arguing where they couldn't.

"If there's one thing I remember from that time period," she says, "it's just the constant drafting. Responding to these objections, over and over."

The avalanche of paperwork could’ve buried someone who wasn't paying attention. Borgeson was absorbing case by exhausting case a master class in what happens when financial transactions are not built carefully enough. What provisions fail to hold, what language doesn't survive a bankruptcy court's scrutiny, how broadly a judge can reach when the documents give them room. She had a front-row seat to the anatomy of financial failure, and she was taking notes.

She keeps a Taylor Swift lyric in the back of her mind now, for moments in a tough negotiation when she needs to remind herself that she’s seen worse: "You wouldn't survive the asylum I grew up in."

"Lehman," she says, "was the asylum."

AFTER THE FIRE

By 2013, the worst of the crisis was over. Markets were recovering. The claims disputes that had consumed years of her career were winding down, and two partners in Cadwalader's D.C. office – Mark Ellenberg and Peter Dodson, both of whom had long run hybrid practices spanning bankruptcy litigation and transactional work – came to Borgeson with a suggestion. The storm had passed. Now came the part where you took what the storm had taught you and applied it going forward.

The invitation was to move into bankruptcy remote structuring – the preventative side of the practice, focused on making sure deals were built correctly from the start rather than litigated over after they collapsed. It was a natural pivot, in theory. In practice, it was a transformation.

"I took what I had learned in closing out transactions," she says, "and applied it to better structuring them going forward."

The shift reframed everything. Where bankruptcy litigation meant responding to disaster, bankruptcy structuring meant anticipating it. Where claims work meant understanding what provisions had failed, structuring work meant making sure those provisions never failed in the first place. Every deal document she now touches carries the institutional memory of thousands of transactions that didn't make it – a body of knowledge, accumulated through Lehman and Lyondell and General Motors, that tells her exactly where the guardrails need to go.

What she found, once she was inside the work, was that it suited her completely. Every deal is different. The facts are always different. There is always an unusual problem that requires solving, or a commercial interest that needs to be preserved even as the structure gets adjusted to make it work. And her job is never simply to say no.

"Our goal is never to say you simply cannot do this transaction," she says. "If one aspect of it doesn't work, we present alternatives. We come up with solutions to preserve the commercial deal, even if we have to structure it a little bit differently."

She describes herself, tongue in cheek, as “Chicken Little” with one eye on where the sky could fall. The deal could be great, the businesses could be performing, or the billion-dollar loan might be ready to close – Borgeson is the one pointing at a single provision – something buried deep in the documents, something that won't matter at all unless everything goes sideways – and saying, quietly, this could be a problem.

She’s usually right…and thankfully, hasn’t had to say, “I told you so.”

MENTORS AND STEWARDSHIP

What distinguished Ellenberg and Dodson, in Borgeson's account, was not just the knowledge they passed on but the way they passed it on. They didn't hand her forms and assign tasks. They taught her the reasoning behind every provision – the bankruptcy case law that had shaped each clause, the courtroom decisions that explained why the language was drafted the way it was and what a bankruptcy judge would see when they read it.

"If you know the reasoning," she says, "you can negotiate better. You know what you can give on without losing the force behind the provision."

If you know the reasoning, you can negotiate better. You know what you can give on without losing the force behind the provision.

That distinction matters enormously in practice. When opposing counsel declares that a form document is non-negotiable – Borgeson knows exactly what is actually at stake in each clause and can hold her ground, or find a path around it, in a way that form-followers simply can't. The terms of the deal dictate the document, she says, not the other way around.

Both mentors retired in recent years, and both were deliberate about what they left behind. They invested in training the next generation of the practice, made sure the institutional knowledge was transferred rather than lost, and ensured that the work they had built over decades at Cadwalader would continue. Borgeson thinks about that often.

"They identified me as someone who could carry it on," she says. "I'm taking it and doing new things with it, but in the end, it's not something that's mine. It's a Cadwalader practice. I feel that responsibility."

It is an unusual thing to hear a partner say – the ego genuinely removed from the equation, replaced by something that sounds more like stewardship. But it runs through everything she says about the firm, about the practice, about the seventeen years she has spent in the same place building on what others built before her. She is, at her core, someone who understands that the most important structures are the ones designed to outlast the people who built them.

The firm's sponsorship program, developed by tax partner Linda Swartz, helped give her the visibility to step out from her mentors' shadow and build relationships across the firm on her own terms – putting a name to a face, creating connections that the work alone, however excellent, doesn't always produce. For Borgeson, it was a reminder that being seen matters as much as the work itself.

COOL COLLABORATION

Borgeson's negotiating philosophy starts with collaboration and holds there even when it gets hard.

The opposing counsel she most wants to work across from is the type who picks up the phone rather than firing back a terse email – who says, "let me just call you and we'll talk it through." She cites Lorne McDougall at Troutman Pepper by name as someone who exemplifies the approach: straightforward, solution-oriented, willing to find the middle ground without turning the negotiation into a performance. She actively tries to emulate it.

What she cannot abide is the categorical refusal. We're not accepting any comments on this. This is non-negotiable. Take it or leave it.

"That's not productive," she says. "It's like, okay, we won't accept any comments either. Where does that lead everybody?"

She knows her own weakness in the dynamic: she matches energy. If someone comes at her hard, her first instinct is to respond in kind, and she beats herself up about it afterward. The countermove she has developed is deliberate and almost physical – stop, breathe, slow the speech, bring everyone back to the factual points. "If you're right on the law and the facts, you don't have to yell," she says. "The yellers are usually the ones who feel a little insecure about what they're saying."

She is, at her core, a deal lawyer who wants the deal to close. The bank wants to lend money. The borrower wants to borrow it. Everyone is working toward the same thing. The negotiation is the means to get there, not to prove a point, adding, "It’s not zero-sum. I'm not going to fight you just to spite you."

COLD IN OFF HOURS

During Covid, Borgeson showed her two sons – now twelve and nine – the movie "The Mighty Ducks." The results were immediate and irreversible. Both boys wanted to play hockey. Fortunately, there was a rink ten minutes from their house in Maryland. They took the boys over, got them started, and then Nelson Burton, a former Washington Capitals player who runs the program at the ice rink, looked at Borgeson and her husband Nick and asked a surprisingly transformative question:

"What about you two?"

If you're right on the law and the facts, you don't have to yell. The yellers are usually the ones who feel a little insecure about what they're saying.

Neither of them had ever played. Her husband had been a basketball player. Borgeson had played lacrosse at Villanova and been a serious athlete her whole life but had let that part of herself go quiet after college, the way athletes do when the team ends and there's nothing to replace it.

They signed up for the adult beginner program.

"When the two of us each individually learned how to stop," she says, "that was like a big celebration."

Now all four of them play. Her twelve-year-old is a goalie. They turned her husband's home office into a locker room and even have a gear dryer. Borgeson plays twice a week – typically at 10pm, which is the ice time adults get stuck with – on a women's team in the Mid-Atlantic Women’s Hockey League called – she says with complete composure, The Angry Beavers.

Beyond the enjoyment of returning to team sports as an adult, the late-night practices solve a specific problem. By 10pm, Borgeson can generally step away from work. When she steps back into working on a deal she's been spinning her wheels on, she’s often found that the solution has appeared while she wasn't looking for it – even if her coach’s conditioning drills ground her into the ice.

"It's a great way to kind of reset, doing something just completely physical, it gets me out of my head. It takes some of the gravity away from the all the complexity."

The athlete's wiring – the grit, the team mentality, the growth mindset, the ability to trust that a breakthrough is coming after the hardest stretch – has been as formative as any legal training.

Her team at Cadwalader is made up of people she would not have predicted as natural collaborators. They are very different from each other. But they share the same underlying operating system, the same instinct to go all hands on deck and work through matters together.

"You would not put us together and say these four people would be great working together," she says. "But we all share those common characteristics."

The structure of the institution is as sound as the structure of the deals they protect.

Borgeson has been at Cadwalader for seventeen years. That used to surprise her – she would have guessed six, she says. But the ability to stick through the ups and downs, to know that the difficult stretch usually precedes the breakthrough, to trust the institution and the team – that, she says, is what keeps you going.

That, and the 10pm ice time. And most definitely the gear dryer.

And getting to draw the picture before any of it begins.

“Austin is an experienced M&A lawyer with a multifaceted skillset, who has worked on a wide range of energy transactions and projects,” said Angelo Bonvino, global head of the Corporate Department at Paul, Weiss. “We are thrilled to welcome him to the firm.”

“We are excited to have Austin, a talented and versatile energy lawyer, on our growing Houston team,” said Sean T. Wheeler, global co-chair of M&A and head of the firm’s Houston office. “Austin’s extensive knowledge and deal experience, particularly in the upstream space, will enhance our ability to serve our clients, many of whom are focused on investment in energy and infrastructure assets.”

In addition to his experience in oil and gas M&A, Lee has represented clients on midstream and downstream energy projects, produced water and salt water disposal projects, and projects involving gas storage and related energy storage facilities. He has represented lenders and borrowers on the financing of oil and gas properties, pipeline systems and other midstream assets, and development facilities. Lee’s experience additionally includes advising energy clients on distressed situations, including restructuring financial arrangements. He previously worked as an in-house upstream legal counsel at an independent exploration and production company, where he worked with a business unit covering areas of South Texas.

Lee’s recent representations include advising Diamondback Energy and certain affiliates in the sale of producing non-operated properties in the Delaware Basin to Riverbend Energy Group; Apache Corporation and certain affiliates on multiple transactions, including the sale of certain unconventional producing assets in New Mexico to Permian Resources Corporation and a separate divestiture of non-core properties in the Permian Basin to an undisclosed buyer; and Grit Oil & Gas Management, LLC and its affiliate in the divestiture of Grit Oil & Gas II, LLC to Jonah Energy LLC.

Lee has been recognized by various publications including by Chambers USA for Nationwide Energy: Oil & Gas (Transactional) since 2021, Chambers Global for Energy: Oil and Gas (Transactional) since 2022, and The Legal 500 US for Energy Transactions: Oil and Gas since 2023. In 2018, he was named to Hart Energy’s Oil and Gas Investor Forty Under 40 list and recognized by Law360 as an Energy Rising Star.

Lee earned a B.A. and an M.A. from The University of Texas at Austin and a J.D., with honors, from The University of Texas School of Law.

The Paul, Weiss Mergers & Acquisitions Practice works with leading private equity firms and many of the world’s largest, most prominent publicly traded and privately held companies, as well as financial advisors and other financial institutions and investors, on the full range of business-critical transactions. The firm’s Infrastructure Group, in particular, provides comprehensive counsel to leading global companies, investors and financial sponsors on complex transactions spanning the infrastructure sector.

About Paul, Weiss

Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP is a global law firm of more than 1,500 lawyers focused on helping clients navigate their most complex legal and business challenges. Known for the depth and excellence of its corporate, litigation and restructuring practices, Paul, Weiss works collaboratively to deliver commercial and innovative solutions, supported by a firmwide commitment to developing and empowering exceptional legal talent and an unwavering dedication to client service. The world’s largest and most important public and private corporations, asset managers and financial institutions look to the firm for advice.

For the uninitiated, LegalTechTalk is a comparatively young event – it held its first edition in London only in 2024 – but it has grown at remarkable speed, drawing more than 5,500 attendees from over 75 countries this year, alongside some 400 speakers. That it has become one of the largest gatherings in the legal calendar in barely two years tells you something in itself about how much energy, money and attention the profession is now pouring into technology, and why what gets said on its stages is lapped up by the legal community.

The excitement is justified. The tools are remarkable and improving quickly, the investment is real, and the best firms are right to be moving with purpose. And the money involved is eye-watering. If you wish to be one of the five main sponsors, it’ll cost you a cool half million pounds (somewhere in London, the sound of corks popping is audibly noticeable). None of what follows is an argument against any of that. It is an argument about what the technology cannot do, and about where the enduring value in this profession actually sits.

The message underneath the noise

The striking thing was how often the point was made not by skeptics, but by the very people closest to the technology.

Karola Kassai, founder and chief executive of KassaiLaw, put it most directly: “AI makes relationships more important.” Chris Grant, who leads Client Value at Goodwin, returned to the same theme more than once. “It’s a relationship business,” he said, and as more of the routine work is automated, “relationships become more important to drive the business forward.”

Perhaps the most pointed version came from Michael Vasalos, Director of Innovation at Harbottle & Lewis – and it is worth dwelling on the fact that this was the innovation director speaking. “Legal work, for clients, is deeply personal,” he said. “You need someone to guide you through. AI can never replace that.”

I do not think these were throwaway lines or polite hedges. The deeper these practitioners went into the technology, the more insistently they pointed back to the human relationship at the center of the work. That is not a coincidence. It is the most important signal the event sent, and it ran underneath almost everything else.

“It all starts with people”

The same idea surfaced, in a different register, in the conversation between Legora and Linklaters – the Stockholm company whose AI platform Linklaters has now rolled out across all of its offices.

Legora’s chief executive, Max Junestrand, made the case for adoption, and his framing was instructive. “It all starts with people,” he said. His argument was that the tools have to be made genuinely simple to use, because the real obstacle is never the software. It is culture, and the challenge of getting your best and busiest lawyers to actually take it up. Junestrand has spoken of the idea that AI makes the strongest lawyers disproportionately more productive – not the average performer, but the best. That detail matters, and I will return to it.

The deeper these practitioners went into the technology, the more insistently they pointed back to the human relationship at the centre of the work.

Paul Lewis, Linklaters’ firmwide managing partner, was candid about what the firm is already getting from the technology, describing it as “like having an associate on tap, at any time.” The stated ambition was to deliver work “faster, better, cheaper.”

Faster and better, I accept without hesitation. It is the third word that deserves scrutiny. Cheaper for whom?

The evidence that the efficiency is reaching clients is, so far, limited. A survey late last year by the Association of Corporate Counsel and Everlaw found that close to six in ten in-house lawyers had seen no noticeable savings from their outside counsel’s use of AI. Over the same period, the leading U.S. firms pushed standard rates beyond a thousand dollars an hour for the first time, with some partners now well above two thousand. Work that once took ten hours can in principle now take one, yet around nine in ten legal pounds and dollars still move through the billable hour, a structure largely unchanged since the 1950s. The work has become faster. The meter, for the moment, has not. The savings are accruing somewhere; it is not yet obvious they are accruing to the client.

What are clients actually paying for?

This brings me to the most useful contribution I heard all week, from Nick West, Partner and Chief Strategy Officer at Mishcon de Reya. His point cut to the heart of the matter:

“AI is shining a spotlight on unbundling, where law firms have combined process, judgement, risk transference etc, into the billable hour. Do we kill the billable hour? I would argue that we shouldn’t be running our law firms on the billable hour in the future. The question is – what is it that clients are paying for? How do we price it? Expertise and risk transference has real value.”

That is the question the whole industry is now being forced to confront, and it is harder than it first appears. The death of the billable hour has been announced for twenty years, and yet no one has produced a serious alternative that a whole firm can adopt. The difficult cases show why. If a client agrees a fixed fee for a piece of litigation and it settles early, is the full fee still owed? How do you price preventative work – the value of a firm spotting a problem before it materializes, increasingly with AI helping to spot it, where success means that nothing goes wrong and there is no outcome to point to? The billable hour endures not because it is good, but because it answers a question its rivals have not: Who bears the risk when the work is genuinely unpredictable?

Beneath that sits a newer problem, one that barely existed five years ago. Clients increasingly arrive already equipped – with AI-generated assumptions, draft documents, extracted clauses, half-formed strategies and a carefully constructed list of questions. The lawyer is then placed in a genuinely difficult position. Offer real substance, and you may be creating reliance you have neither been paid for nor properly defined. Hold back, and the client wonders why they came to you at all. And whatever you do say can now be taken away and developed elsewhere, including inside a machine, with your judgement faintly visible in a decision you were never instructed to make. Once everything that can be reduced to precedent has been absorbed by the technology, the question becomes unavoidable: What is left that clients should pay a premium for?

The answer is the one it has always been. Judgement.

The forty years behind the line

There is a well-worn story about Picasso. Asked to sketch on a napkin and then quoting an extravagant price, he is challenged by an admirer who protests that it only took him a moment. “No,” he replies, “it has taken me forty years.” The anecdote is almost certainly apocryphal, but it survives because it is true in the way that counts. The price is not for the moment. It is for the forty years of mastery that make the moment possible.

Once everything that can be reduced to precedent has been absorbed by the technology, the question becomes unavoidable: What is left that clients should pay a premium for?

The naive view of AI is that it strips the value out of expertise by commoditizing it. In fact, the opposite is happening. Demand for genuinely complex, high-stakes legal work has not fallen; if anything, the value of expertise and judgement has risen since AI arrived, because the gap between commoditized work and specialized, complex work has widened. The lower tiers of the pyramid are being automated. The summit is becoming rarer, more visible and worth more. The forty years are appreciating, not depreciating.

What remains when you remove the technology

One of the more honest moments of the two days came from Mark Cohen, the founder of LegalMosaic, who told a legal technology conference that he does not really believe in the term “legal tech.” Strip the technology out of the description, and what is this enormous gathering actually composed of? Conversations. The sessions that mattered all resolved into the same thing: people talking to people, building the trust on which instructions are eventually given. That is where lawyers have always done their most valuable work, and it is the part the technology does not touch.

Technology helps. But it does not, by itself, get you into the room with the client. It may help you arrive better prepared, but it does not win the trust that leads to the engagement. Clients do not buy from software. They buy from people they believe in.

The question firms should be asking

So I left with a question that is not, in the end, about technology at all. Are law firms investing enough in their people?

Almost everyone at the event was eager to discuss the tools. Far fewer were discussing, with the same urgency, the human beings who have to use them. Yet if the central proposition is that AI makes the best lawyers disproportionately more productive, then the most important strategic decision a firm can make is not which platform to license. It is how seriously it invests in the people who will turn that technology into a genuine advantage.

That means a great deal more than a license and a login. The tools are one part of it, and an important part. But so is emotional intelligence. So is marketing. So is proper business development training, coaching, and the patient work of raising a lawyer’s profile so that the market understands how good they are. The leading rainmakers drive the firm. They shape its strategy, carry its profitability and are the reason the most complex work arrives in the first place. The growth mindset that everyone invokes does not come from software. It is unlocked by investing in your best people as people.

People respond to that investment. They always have. Which is why I suspect it will prove the smartest return available to any firm at this moment – smarter than relying on technology alone to shortcut the work.

Law is a people business. It was before LegalTechTalk and it will be long after. The genuinely valuable lesson of spending two days surrounded by the most advanced legal technology on earth was that it left me more convinced of this, not less.

Sidebar is an occasional new column from Lawdragon Managing Director David Burgess, offering fresh insight and perspectives on the business and practice of law.

This has been a hot year in IP. From trademark wars in the fashion industry involving "dupes" and resale platforms, to patent challenges in biotech over safe harbor boundaries and prior art disclosure in gene-editing. 

And of course, AI – everywhere, in everything, all at once. 

These are the lawyers protecting innovation, defending brand integrity and leveraging the assets at the heart of their clients' businesses.

Matt Gaudet of Duane Morris has a highly active patent practice, having secured over $100M for patent holders on the plaintiff side – and successfully defending against nearly $4B billion in infringement claims. Two recent notable victories involved a rare pre-trial win for longtime client Cisco in a $600M claim by Tel Aviv University, and a stunning $2.7B retrial verdict for the tech titan over cybersecurity patent claims brought by Centripetal. 

With a Ph.D. in biochemistry, molecular and cell biology from Cornell, Dr. Eldora Ellison at Sterne Kessler is one of the most sought-after names in biotech IP. She is the lead patent strategist for the University of California on its revolutionary CRISPR gene-editing technology. She is also one of the most accomplished post-grant practitioners in the U.S., with a track record of over 80 inter partes review and post-grant review proceedings with the USPTO's Patent Trial and Appeal Board.

Miriam Gundt of Hogan Lovells has been a fixture of the The Unified Patent Court since its inception in 2023. She serves as the firm's global head of IP, overseeing one of the busiest and most successful patent disputes practices in Europe. Based in Düsseldorf, Gundt also works with pharmaceutical companies and other clients on international IP challenges that arose from the implementation of the U.S.'s Inflation Reduction Act. 

This is our second year publishing this guide, which, like all our guides, was developed through a combination of robust editorial research and nominations. We are so grateful for the many thoughtful nominations across this bustling and competitive field! Those marked with an askterix are members of our esteemed Hall of Fame. 

Thompson represents corporate boards, financial institutions, business executives and global companies in high-stakes litigation and investigations, guiding clients through moments where legal, regulatory and business risks converge – where judgment matters just as much as strategy.

“What motivates me most is helping a client get through a difficult moment as smoothly as possible,” Thompson says. “I want to help clients navigate unfamiliar systems that may not have been designed with their situation in mind.”

That motivation has influenced every chapter of her career – from sitting across the table as an advisor to first-generation students trying to navigate the college admissions process, to helping corporate boards steer through bribery scandals, plane crashes and federal investigations, to standing up for immigrants and survivors in pro bono matters.

At Sullivan & Cromwell, where Thompson spent her early years as a lawyer embedded in sprawling corporate crises, learning how power, money and law collide when everything is on the line, she was introduced to the machinery of elite litigation: how a single argument to a regulator can ripple through class actions, boardrooms and the court of public opinion. How loudly the truth speaks, if you know how to wield it.

“I don’t feel the need to pound the table when the law is on my side,” Thompson says. “Being firm and right is more effective than being loud.”

The desire for more autonomy over how to advise her clients then led Thompson to Kaplan Martin, the elite New York-based boutique firm co-founded by prominent commercial litigators Roberta “Robbie” Kaplan and Timothy Martin, where corporate defense, plaintiff-side litigation and public-interest work live side by side.

“Being able to engage in such a broad practice across industries and areas of the law with the same small group of talented attorneys enables us to be nimble and broadly informed in our advice and litigation strategy with all of our clients,” Thompson explains.

The move to an elite boutique was an evolution of her practice – one grounded in precision, strategic clarity and the desire for even more disciplined execution of complex matters.

Lawdragon: Where did you first get the idea to become a lawyer?

Tasha Thompson: Both my parents were lawyers, which is probably how I ended up becoming one – and also why I resisted it for so long. I grew up in a small town in Alaska where my dad was a general-practice lawyer who handled whatever the community needed, sometimes getting paid in tractors. My mom was the borough’s municipal attorney. Our dinner table was always full of legal discussions.

The opportunities for earlier case leadership are unique to a firm this size, as is the amount of collaboration. We’re able to serve large clients and matters because we’re nimble, creative and efficient.

I did debate in high school and mock trial in college, but for a while, I was determined not to follow in their footsteps. I majored in English, took the LSAT, then went home to work as a college and career counselor. I was one of only a few people from my high school class to attend a four-year college, so I wanted to give back and help people from my community navigate systems that weren’t built for them. But I still longed for a bigger intellectual challenge.

That combination of rigor and service is what finally drew me to law school, and specifically the “citizen lawyer” tradition at William and Mary Law School. It felt like a natural extension of what I was already doing: helping people understand the rules and move their lives forward. After law school, I joined Sullivan & Cromwell, knowing that S&C would provide excellent training and the opportunity to learn from exceptional attorneys.

LD: Is there a case that stands out as particularly memorable from your time at Sullivan & Cromwell?

TT: The one I was deeply embedded in until I decided to make the transition to Kaplan Martin was a multifaceted litigation involving a regional utilities company. It was a great example of how the generalist model that had drawn me to S&C was utilized in practice.

We represented the utilities company after its former CEO and other senior executives were accused of bribing a politician. It became a significant regional scandal in Ohio and triggered a cascade of issues for the company: employment disputes, criminal and regulatory investigations, securities litigation, consumer class actions and derivative suits. It was a full-blown corporate crisis.

Our firm came in after another firm had handled the initial response, and I was the first associate from our firm to really dig into the matter and to learn how all the facts and proceedings fit together. What made it so exciting was seeing how a move in one arena affected the others – our strategy with state industry regulators shaped our arguments in federal investigations, which in turn influenced the class actions, all against the backdrop of intense public and media scrutiny.

That case was the clearest expression of what I loved about S&C: being able to work across disciplines, from regulatory strategy to litigation to board advisory, and to use a single, integrated approach to navigate something incredibly complex and high-stakes. It was also the moment when I could really see the kind of lawyer I was becoming.

My practice at S&C ended up mirroring a lot of the firm’s broader work – corporate crisis management for some of the largest corporate crises in the country.

LD: What prompted your move to Kaplan Martin?

TT: A lot went into the decision. I truly loved my time at Sullivan & Cromwell. I met wonderful people there, I had incredible mentors, and it’s where I learned how to be a lawyer.

At the same time, once I became more experienced as an attorney, I wanted to be in a position where I could more fully be an individual advocate for my clients. S&C is intentionally – and very successfully – a large, highly integrated firm. You’re part of a collective, which is one of its great strengths. But looking ahead, I found myself wanting more space to develop my own voice, my own judgment and my own practice as a lawyer.

I had also long admired Robbie Kaplan and her work. She also came from the Big Law world, getting her start and legal training as a leading commercial litigator at Paul, Weiss, and eventually became interested in going smaller to a firm where she would have more freedom to use her own, powerful voice and ideas for her clients. I had always been intrigued by the idea of helping to build something from the ground up, so when I heard she was starting a new firm with Tim, that really caught my attention. I have spent a lot of time thinking about what makes teams – and firms – work well: how you train people, how you set expectations, how you build culture. To be part of creating that at a brand-new firm with such strong leadership was incredibly appealing.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about what makes teams – and firms – work well: how you train people, how you set expectations, how you build culture. To be part of creating that at a brand-new firm with such strong leadership was incredibly appealing.

When I met the partners at Kaplan Martin, they were not only impressive lawyers but thoughtful, inspiring people with deeply interesting backgrounds and experiences and strong ideas about how to most effectively and meaningfully use their legal talents. I could see that this was a place where I would be able to grow in new ways, take on a broader range of cases, work more directly with clients and continue to expand the definition of the kind of lawyer I want to be.

The move was about building something new and taking the next step in my own development. So far, it’s been incredibly rewarding.

LD: How has your practice changed since you've moved to Kaplan Martin?

TT: The really sophisticated commercial litigation work is still there and perhaps one of the more noteworthy things about the firm is that despite its smaller size, it handles the same sized clients and matters as Big Law firms. The opportunities for earlier case leadership are unique to a firm this size, as is the amount of collaboration. We’re able to serve large clients and matters because we’re nimble, creative and efficient – and that’s because every member of the team is read in on all the details and steps up to contribute.

I’m on the plaintiffs’ side sometimes now, too, which is new for me – and meaningful. Representing individuals who’ve been harmed has brought a more human, emotional dimension to my work, and it’s made me a better advocate overall. My practice is also broader, with more employment and discrimination matters, alongside complex commercial defense cases that feel familiar from my earlier days. Kaplan Martin is often asked to advise companies before an issue becomes a full-blown legal matter, so I also have a more active advisory role now, helping boards assess risk and strategy before a situation becomes a crisis.

LD: How do you advise clients when it comes to high-profile cases?

TT: This is something I really learned from the partners at Kaplan Martin. I think they are more willing to think outside the usual “toolbox” that litigators use and strategically leverage different resources – including the press – to help shape or advance their clients’ causes.

It always starts with the client. How public you are in an active litigation depends on how much the client wants – or is able – to engage with the press, and it has to be handled very carefully.

The press can be a useful instrument for our clients – not just something to manage but a critical tool that can help explain what’s happening and support a client’s broader interests. It’s important to remember that our clients are never dealing with legal issues in a vacuum; they are dealing with them in the context of other business or personal decisions. Sometimes the press can provide a new avenue to message to their stakeholders or to shape a narrative. Considering press strategy throughout your work can make the work more dynamic, because you’re not only thinking about how you write briefs or make legal arguments in court, but also how those arguments will play in the court of public opinion.

LD: What has it been like to help shape the culture at a new firm?

TT: The culture here is collaborative. I have always believed that the best teams are the ones where everyone feels comfortable speaking up about strategy, next steps, even the wording of a brief. In big firms, hierarchy can get in the way of that, so I’ve always tried to create a more open, collaborative environment. Here, it’s natural. We all sit on the same floor, so decisions happen in real time, often as a result of a quick hallway conversation or a moment ducking into someone’s office. That closeness makes collaboration quick and easily achievable, and it makes us better advocates for our clients.

It always starts with the client. How public you are in an active litigation depends on how much the client wants – or is able – to engage with the press, and it has to be handled very carefully.

In addition to always having a candy bowl and an open door, I also helped start our “lunch and learn” sessions where associates can talk about skills, questions and professional development in a relaxed, collaborative setting. When associates know their ideas matter, they take ownership of the work in a different way.

LD: How would you describe your style as a litigator?

TT: At the core of my practice is really knowing my client – understanding their motivations and letting that shape our strategy. This goes back to not counseling clients in a vacuum – all the attorneys here make a point of viewing our clients and their matters within the context of their ventures and goals. Being a litigator means more than just arguing to a judge or a mediator. It also means helping your client stay focused on their real goals and not get pulled into issues that don’t serve them. In that sense, you’re advising on both sides of the table.

My style was shaped at S&C and has been honed at Kaplan Martin. I believe being firm and right is more effective than being loud or aggressive. I’m friendly but direct with opposing counsel, and in court I don’t feel the need to pound the table when the law is on my side. That tone shifts when I’m with my client, where the focus is on guidance, clarity and trust.

LD: What trends have you seen recently in terms of the types of cases that are keeping you busy?

TT: It’s a pretty wide range. A series of consumer class actions is keeping me the busiest right now, which reflects more traditional defense-side class action work. I’m also working on a lot of individual representations, which are challenging but meaningful.

On the legislative side, now that New York City has recently renewed the Gender Motivated Violence Act, which reopened a lookback window for abuse claims and otherwise strengthened the pre-existing law – I expect that to generate a significant amount of work as well. Many people in New York and across the nation watched our work with E. Jean Carroll and know we go to great lengths to fight for abuse victims. That’s an area I’m watching closely.

LD: Is there a type of case or a practice area that you would like to tackle next?

TT: One type of case I’d love to do more of again is financial litigation. I’ve always been drawn to the technical complexity of those cases – the rules, the structures, the details. And with our growing financial institutions practice since the arrival of Ellen Holloman, who has years of experience in that space, I anticipate that more opportunities will be coming my way.

That said, I’m very happy with the range of work I have now. And like everyone here, I’m always eager for more time in the courtroom. Trials are energizing.

LD: You have a really active pro bono practice. What are the areas that really are important to you?

TT: Pro bono has always been very important to me. I serve on the NYLAG Pro Bono Associate Advisory Board to help make pro bono easier and more accessible for firms, so they can take on more of it. In my own work, I like a mix. I care deeply about direct-service cases – immigration matters, for example – where helping one person fill out a few forms can genuinely change their life. That kind of crisis-moment support feels like the purest form of pro bono.

I’m also drawn to broader-impact public interest work, and it’s something this firm has always taken seriously. Being at a place that has the flexibility and the will to take on politically charged public-interest matters is something I really value.

LD: What keeps you motivated in your work?

TT: I get a lot of my energy from the work itself – helping clients untangle whatever crisis they’re in and figuring out the right path forward. I’ve always thought of this job as problem-solving under pressure: listening with empathy, advocating with clarity and making sure our writing captures not just the law but the client’s real story and motivations. At the end of the day, what motivates me most is helping someone get through a difficult moment as smoothly as possible.

Meredith Frank, co-managing partner of the Southeast at legal search firm CenterPeak, leads with intention and with humanity at the core of every interaction. “I've always been driven by human connection – by the energy of building relationships and creating meaningful outcomes for others,” Frank explains. 

To do her job, Frank brings a precise, intentional approach to every engagement, whether placing law firm partners and groups at elite law firms or guiding clients through strategic growth.  

Frank began her career as a complex commercial litigator in Philadelphia, earning her J.D. from Temple University Beasley School of Law before spending several years in practice. 

But she soon realized her mission extended beyond the courtroom, to serve not just corporate clients, but the legal community at large. In the two decades since, Frank has guided elite partners across a range of practice areas through high-impact lateral moves to the world's leading law firms, spanning multiple major markets. 

She has also worked alongside senior leadership teams as a strategic partner, advising on key acquisitions, merger strategy and market expansion. 

Frank served as Managing Partner in Major, Lindsey & Africa's partner practice group for over a decade before joining CenterPeak in 2024. 

The ultimate goal for Frank as a Lawdragon 100 Global Leaders in Legal Strategy & Consulting member is “building lasting partnerships defined by synergy, shared values and sustained competitive advantage.” 

Now living in Parkland, Fla., with her husband, Eric, and their sons, Brady and Cooper, Frank remains an avid Philadelphia sports fan. She is also a travel enthusiast and a passionate foodie.  

Lawdragon: Can you tell us what you do? 

Meredith Frank: As a law firm partner recruiter, I operate at the intersection of talent and strategy – representing, advising and guiding elite partners through some of the most consequential career decisions of their professional lives. At the same time, I serve as a strategic partner to law firm leadership, helping firms build for the future through lateral acquisitions that reshape practices and markets. 

The work is inherently nuanced. Effectively serving all sides of the market – high-value partners and groups seeking the right platform, and firm leaders seeking the right talent – requires more than market knowledge. It demands a genuine understanding of the underlying dynamics, long-term goals, culture and strategic vision that drive each party. My effectiveness depends entirely on the depth of those relationships. It is that foundation of trust that enables the kind of lasting, often transformational outcomes my clients and candidates strive for. 

Time and again, I've watched partners make that leap and emerge not just professionally elevated, but with renewed energy, sharper focus and a deeper sense of self.

LD: How did you first become interested in this line of work? 

MF: The law has always been part of my DNA. My grandfather was a lawyer. My father was a lawyer. And from a young age, I watched as friends and family turned to my father for guidance on some of the most important decisions of their lives. That left a deep impression on me – the idea that a trusted advisor could have a profound and lasting impact on the people they serve. 

Practicing law fulfilled part of that calling. But I've always been driven by human connection, by the energy of building relationships and creating meaningful outcomes for others. Over time, I felt a growing pull toward something different – a desire to make a broader, more lasting impact on the legal community as a whole. A family member in the legal recruiting industry suggested I consider the profession, and it turned out to be the perfect answer. It allows me to combine my legal foundation with my passion for people and to play a meaningful role in shaping the careers of exceptional lawyers and the trajectories of the world's leading law firms. 

LD: What advice do you have now for current students or young professionals who wish to have a similar type of career? 

MF: Don't be afraid of change. 

For most people, identity and community are deeply intertwined with the professional path they've chosen, making change feel overwhelming and destabilizing. But in my experience, it is also one of the most powerful catalysts for growth – forcing clarity, building resilience and revealing possibilities that would otherwise remain out of view.   

Much of what I do is help extraordinarily accomplished partners work through the psychological weight of a lateral move, which is often far more challenging than the logistics. Time and again, I've watched partners make that leap and emerge not just professionally elevated, but with renewed energy, sharper focus and a deeper sense of self. 

Lean into change rather than away from it. The willingness to evolve is not a sign of instability; it's a sign of growth and wisdom. And often, moving on is exactly what it takes to move up. 

LD: What advice would you give potential clients in terms of how to work most productively with an outside advisor? 

MF: Help us help you! We want to be your strategic partners. Not just a vendor you call when a need arises, but a trusted extension of your leadership team, helping you execute on your most mission-critical growth strategies and realize your long-term vision. That kind of partnership only works when clients are willing to bring us inside and share the full picture of where the firm is headed, what's working, what isn't and what success truly looks like. 

On the other end, be open to feedback and perspective. One of our greatest value propositions is our access to a wealth of real-time market intelligence – what candidates are hearing across the street, how your firm is perceived in the market, where the talent is moving and why. That kind of nuanced, ground-level insight can help you sharpen your strategy and give you a meaningful competitive edge in the war for talent. 

The willingness to evolve is not a sign of instability – it's a sign of growth and wisdom. And often, moving on is exactly what it takes to move up.

LD: What do you do for fun when you’re outside the office? 

MF: I spend a significant portion of my weekends on soccer fields watching my two boys chase their dreams of becoming the next Messi while I chase my coffee. Otherwise, you'll find me on long walk therapy sessions with my best friend, hosting epic game nights or deep in a Netflix spiral with my husband. Both of us are fully committed to "just one more episode" at 1 a.m. Our two dogs are constant companions and a never-ending source of joy and chaos. 

And if you really want to know what keeps me busy between all of that, I'm perpetually redecorating every room in our home on a rolling three- to five-year cycle. There are mood boards everywhere, capturing my ever-evolving design visions. My family has learned to just embrace it.