They are barristers to billionaires, consiglieres to ultra capitalists, Succession come to life.

They cater to the world’s richest clientele on an intersection of estate and tax planning, wealth transfers, family offices and – shocker – disputes over all that money. They often provide adjacent advice on deals, real estate, finance and other corporate matters. There are 3,428 billionaires in the world with a combined net worth of $20.1 trillion, according to Forbes. And they need a lot of lawyers.

“The socioeconomic health of multiple continents is dependent on his well-being,” said Kendall Roy of his ailing father in Succession, the perfect portrayal of life in the very thin air of the very very rich.

Gabriel Estevez is head of the Private Wealth group at Winston Taylor. Based in London, Estevez is a finance lawyer whose practice encompasses private wealth, real estate and venture debt. He advises the ultra-high-net worth clients of family offices, start-ups, private equity firms, global investment funds and alternative lenders with cross-border legal issues. He advises on global assets from the U.S. to Latin America, Europe and the Middle East.

Laura Zwicker is co-chair of Private Client services at Greenberg Glusker and leads its International Private Wealth practice. Based in Los Angeles, Zwicker advises multinational and domestic families across generations on the tax, trust and philanthropic issues involved in global and domestic wealth transfer. She guides on matters of tax residency and pre-immigration and emigration structuring, counsels founders on liquidity event planning, and serves as outside counsel to family offices and fiduciaries on planning issues, including the implications of family members and beneficiaries becoming, or ceasing to be, U.S. tax residents. Her work entails working with other specialists from Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand to support her private wealth clients.

Natasha Robertson is a partner in Norton Rose Fulbright’s Private Wealth and Tax, Trusts & Estates practice. Based in New York, she counsels individuals and families on estate planning, intergenerational wealth transfer, and estate and trust administration. Working alongside clients’ financial advisors, she helps create comprehensive solutions for wealth transfer through estate, gift and income tax planning as well as charitable giving. She also counsels public charities and private foundations on formation, corporate governance and compliance.

We selected this guide through our journalist-based process combining independent research, nominations and discussions with peers and other experts. Shining the light on those who advise the few in a world of so many is a fascinating exercise illuminating one more facet of how the law supports a vast variety of needs.

From being chosen as TechGC’s first talent partner to helping build the team the AI-native law firm Norm AI, Burke has focused on connecting the attorneys shaping new markets with firms positioned to support their growth. His philosophy is simple: Don’t be a headhunter, be a matchmaker.

“My people are the more entrepreneurial partners who want to have a seat at the table, who want to have an impact,” he says.

A member of the Lawdragon 100 Global Leaders in Legal Strategy and Consulting, Burke spoke recently with us about legal recruiting and the challenges of placing top legal talent at a time of rapid technological change.

Lawdragon: What inspired you to found Whistler Partners? And how did you decide to focus on technology and startups?

Sean Burke: My first day as a recruiter, I cold-called an associate at a top startup firm with an in-house job at a Wall Street bank. The associate said, "Why would I want to go in-house to a bank? I wear jeans to work, I have 30 startup clients and I get paid the same as a Cravath associate." And my response was, "Why didn't someone tell me that job existed when I was in law school?" I became an IP litigator because I didn't know any better. In hindsight, I should have been a startup attorney.

I started out placing IP attorneys because that was what I knew, and that led to me placing startup attorneys. Eventually, a managing partner of a startup firm came to me, after I’d probably placed seven of his ten most recent hires, and he said, “I should just use you. It doesn't help me to get 10 resumes that are all roughly equal on paper. I need someone like you to tell me why two of these 10 people would make good startup attorneys. I don't even want to interview a second-year associate unless they’ve talked to you.” Then I looked around at my old recruiting shop and I was like, "if I have to meet and personally vet every single person we submit to this firm, then I think it's just time that I open my own shop.”

Then a boutique entertainment firm asked me to find a tech partner, and a top tech firm asked me to find an entertainment partner, and I said to myself, “there’s something interesting happening here.”  Most recruiting shops say, "We do everything." I said, "What if I open an agency to focus on startups and tech, and what I call ‘tech convergence?’" And so within a year, I opened Whistler.

LD: Can you explain what you mean by tech convergence?

SB: I think Netflix is probably the best example. They produce TV shows and movies, but at their core, they're really a technology company, and they approached entertainment from a tech perspective. We now take for granted that every industry has a tech counterpart (healthtech, fintech, etc.). But when I started Whistler in 2015, tech hadn't really permeated every sector in the same way, and my mentors thought I was crazy for “limiting my business” to tech.

LD: What makes someone want to be a startup lawyer?

SB: I think they prefer the chaos; they prefer working with people who are making these big bets. And they like that you can get closer to the business side, even as a junior associate. When you're at a white shoe firm and you represent a global asset manager, you're just a cog in the machine on PE deals, especially when you’re starting out. But first to third-year startup attorneys have one-on-one relationships with CEOs, founders, and GCs. One startup partner who started his career doing M&A at a Wall Street firm told me, "When I was a fourth-year, often the person I was talking to at the PE fund knew more about M&A than I did. Now I'm in this venture/startup world, I run everything, and I have to come up with the solutions myself.” Some people just love rolling their sleeves up, getting their hands dirty, and helping run every facet of a business.

LD: Who are the lawyers that you’re targeting?

SB: My people are the more entrepreneurial partners who make $1M to $3M a year. Partners who want to have a seat at the table, who want to have an impact, and who have developed clients of their own.

LD: To that end, how would you describe your matchmaking philosophy between partners and firms or companies?

SB: A friend of mine from outside of the legal industry pointed out that partner recruiting is a merger. I've never been in a situation where a firm has asked me, "Which of the two people that you have in front of us should we pick?" One, I don't make the hiring decision. And then, two, I don't decide which firm my candidate picks. My job is to help each firm put its best foot forward, and the same for the candidate. Then ultimately, the decision is a business decision for both parties. It's a rational decision based on some subjective aspects and some objective aspects. And I've helped the firm position itself so that my candidate can make the best choice with the information available.

LD: How do you help your lawyers put their best foot forward?

SB: A lot of it is understanding the market, understanding their practice, and then helping them connect the dots. Sometimes, it's almost an accounting issue: “At my firm, I get X, Y, Z credit on originations and shared credit. If I go across the street to this firm, all of a sudden, that exact same client list and the exact same practice, they value it at times two.” I've had partners move and get paid double, and not a single thing changed in terms of who calls them and what they do.

LD: What if a lawyer is getting competing offers? How do you help them navigate that?

SB: One of my partner clients gave me great advice. He said, "This isn't like negotiating on behalf of an athlete where your job is to leverage all the different offers to compete and get the max value for your client. Your job is to make sure that when they make that move, it’s successful. And the amount of money that you negotiate upfront needs to fit within that firm's business model, so that three years from now, your partner is doing well, well-liked, and their practice is growing. If they come in with an offer that does not make sense within the system of that firm, you're setting them up for a disaster two or three years from now.”

I've had partners move and get paid double, and not a single thing changed in terms of who calls them and what they do.

LD: How do you make sure that your placements will be lasting?

SB: A lot of it is knowing the firm really well, knowing the personalities and what the firm prioritizes. And then seeing the way the firm approaches the interview process, the way they structured the comp package. You can tell from that process if they really want this person there. I want to see that they’ve gotten buy-in for this hire and they're going to support them. And then some of it is just pure gut instinct between you and your candidate.

LD: What defines a successful move?

SB: Usually, it's going to be satisfaction in their practice. Money matters, but also how the firm integrates them – that they have all of the resources they need, that they have a seat at the table, and that they trust the firm’s leadership.

LD: When you're talking about partners, they've been at this a while, and they've probably had other legal recruiting firms approach them. What sets Whistler apart?

SB: A lot of it is credibility. Do they trust that I am truly acting in their best interest? Most of my candidates are partners I’ve known for years, some for their entire legal careers, and they’ve come back to me regularly for career advice. Also, Whistler as a whole has built up a lot of trust with firms over the years, and that's to the advantage of the candidate. Beyond that, we're genuinely passionate about working with startup and tech attorneys. We like to champion lawyers who are entrepreneurial and doing innovative, sometimes poorly understood things. We're just personally invested.

LD: Are there any really impactful moves that stand out to you?

SB: I’ve placed a handful of GCs who wanted to go back to a firm, and all they had was Whistler’s advocacy and their business plan. We convinced the firm to make a bet on them, and they're all absolutely crushing it. On paper, most firms wouldn't even take a meeting with someone coming from in-house. But based on our reputation, we got them in the door and then proved to the firm that they should make a bet on this person. I love lateral partner placements, but an in-house to partner placement is a whole other level of advocacy, which is fun for me.

LD: You've seen a lot of different technology cycles. Where do you see AI fitting into that?

SB: From the perspective of how this will shape people’s practices, a lot of our laws have already been pushed to the limit with technology. Can we really be using 50- and 100-year-old copyright laws to deal with robot AI agents? Part of what I love about my job is hearing about the work my clients are doing. Many of them are at the forefront of tackling some really complex, novel issues.

Then there’s AI’s impact on how people practice law, and legal AI is obviously going to be so transformative. I think there's going to be a massive change in how law firms function, the economic models, and how clients get legal services. It's going to massively impact how many lawyers get Big Law jobs straight out of law school. The traditional model of the top firms being bottom-heavy, and the partners are making $3M to $10M a year because they’ve built that pyramid – I just don't know if that model's sustainable.

I also think that with PE entering the space via MSO deals, solo practitioners, regional firms, and smaller firms are just going to get crushed. How can a three-person real estate boutique with no real proprietary technology compete with a firm that’s more AI-enabled, and therefore faster and cheaper?

We're genuinely passionate about working with startup and tech attorneys. We like to champion lawyers who are entrepreneurial and doing innovative, sometimes poorly understood things.

LD: What about the wave of lateral partner movement that's been happening over the last few years? How do you view that trend?

SB: Ultimately, I don’t think this game of musical chairs is good for the industry. I think the competition for the $20M partners is hurting the culture of the top firms. It's massively punishing the younger partners who are performing well but aren’t rainmakers. We're seeing a hollowing out of the middle, which leaves the haves and have-nots at these firms.

But AI is going to massively impact this. I just don't know if you can keep hiring partners who make $20M a year, and if they can actually deliver enough value such that they'll be worth $20M a year.

LD: What do you look for when you're hiring a recruiter?

SB: One of my recent hires jokes that her social battery never runs out -- talking to people is her leisure. That's exactly what I look for: someone who can't help but make connections with people.

I also love hiring people with competitive backgrounds. We’re advocating for our candidates while competing against a lot of other recruiters. I like people who are willing to dive in, who want to win, and whose backgrounds show they've thrived in competitive environments.

LD: What's been the most fulfilling aspect of working with attorneys?

SB: One of my favorite candidates got caught up in one of these downturns, but he sent me a note when I got him an interview that we thought was a long shot. He's Irish, and I'm Irish, and he sent me a note that said, "You know, on the old sod, you'd be some version of a priest."

Grant & Eisenhofer partners Lisa Weinstein and Gerald Jowers represented Naqah Lake and his mother, Laurel Browne, in the lawsuit, which ranks among the largest medical malpractice verdicts ever in North Carolina. It is also the largest award in a case involving a brachial plexus injury – damage caused to a network of spinal cord nerves that control the shoulder, arm and hand.

The five-week trial convened in state court in Wake County, NC. The 12-person jury reached unanimous verdicts confirming both negligence on the part of the hospital and the resident physician, as well as damages.

During Laurel Browne’s labor, on September 17, 2019, defendant resident doctor noted shoulder dystocia, a condition that occurs when a baby's head emerges, but the shoulder becomes stuck behind the mother's pubic bone. Although it is the anterior shoulder, the shoulder that is stuck behind the pubic symphysis, that is usually injured; in Naqah’s case, it was the posterior shoulder—the shoulder that was not stuck—that was injured.

The doctor performed a fetal vertex rotation, a maneuver that should never be performed to relieve a shoulder dystocia. This maneuver rotates the baby’s head while the shoulder remains impacted, and therefore caused Naqah’s global pan plexus injuries. He was born with permanent nerve damage to his left brachial plexus, which rendered his left arm, shoulder, and hand useless for life.

The hospital tried to argue that Naqah’s injury occurred before birth, in utero, despite the contemporaneous record by the defendant resident doctor that she had performed the fetal vertex rotation. Because the injury occurred to Naqah’s posterior shoulder, it made the plaintiffs’ case harder to prove causation of injury.  

Naqah’s family alleged that the facts established negligence and that the medical care and treatment did not comply with the minimal standard of care for obstetricians in the State of North Carolina. They argued that the medical team did not use all available or appropriate maneuvers to manage Naqah’s delivery.

As a result of the defendants’ negligence, plaintiffs argued, Naqah experienced, and will continue to experience, physical and mental pain and suffering, disfigurement, disability, and permanent injuries.

Following the two-phase trial, presided by Judge Winston C. Gilchrist, the jury unanimously returned a verdict for Naqah of $18.2 million, comprising $2.2 million for economic damages and $16 million for non-economic damages.

Grant & Eisenhofer partner Lisa Weinstein is regarded as one of the nation’s preeminent lawyers representing women and children who have suffered birth injury and trauma.

“Baby Naqah had all five nerves in his left brachial plexus avulsed and ripped from his spinal cord at birth by the negligence of the doctor who performed a maneuver that should never have been performed,” said Weinstein. “The jury rightly recognized that Naqah will never be able to play sports that require both hands, hug his mother with both arms, hold his own child with both arms, or simply clap his hands, because of a ‘never maneuver.’ We are grateful for the jury for holding WakeMed accountable for the lifelong disability it caused.”

The case, brought in the General Court of Justice, Superior Court Division, in Wake County, NC, is captioned: Naqah Maxwell Lake, a minor, by and through his Guardian ad Litem, Christopher Duggan, and Laurel Browne, individually v. WakeMed (File No: 22CVS011664-910)

The firm today announced that Matt Barr has been appointed to the newly created role of Global Chair of Restructuring, a direct outcome of a strategic review focused on how Weil positions its practice for continued success in the years ahead.

The next generation of matters will demand seamless coordination across jurisdictions, deeper integration between restructuring and strategic capital solutions, faster innovation and a leadership model designed for an increasingly global market. Creating a Global Chair of Restructuring is a deliberate investment in building the practice clients will need over the next decade.

Importantly, the structure that has made Weil's restructuring practice exceptional remains intact. Jeff Saferstein, Ronit Berkovich and Sunny Singh continue as Co-Chairs of the U.S. Restructuring practice, Andrew Wilkinson continues as Chair of U.K. Restructuring, and restructuring partners in Germany, France, and Hong Kong anchor the Firm’s global capabilities. Barr’s role adds a global connective layer, not a new hierarchy.

“Restructuring is central to Weil’s growth, and Matt’s appointment is the result of a deliberate decision about how we build for the future," said Barry Wolf, Executive Partner of Weil. “Matt is one of the most respected lawyers in the market and is sought out by clients in situations that don’t come with a playbook. The depth we have in this practice, from Matt to our U.S. Co-Chairs to Andrew and the broader team, is unmatched and we are aggressively developing and building on it.”

For Barr, the appointment is as much about what the market is demanding as it is about what Weil has built. “The restructuring landscape has fundamentally changed,” he said. “Clients need counsel that can structure creative solutions out-of-court, move across jurisdictions as fluidly as the situations themselves demand and understand that the most sophisticated parties today are making deliberate, strategic choices about forum and process. What distinguishes Weil is that we have built a practice with the genuine depth to meet clients wherever those choices lead and the ambition to keep innovating as the market evolves. Our team is the best in the business, which is based on our collaborative and relentlessly responsive culture.”

That ambition has a track record behind it. Weil pioneered the first liability management exercise and today remains at the forefront of a space it helped create, currently advising on over 25 LME transactions in 2026 alone totaling over $35 billion in liabilities. Barr, with the restructuring group leadership, and Justin Lee, Global Head of Liability Management and Strategic Capital Solutions, have been at the center of that evolution, advising parties across the globe in some of the largest restructurings in recent years.

“We are at a pivotal moment for the legal industry, for our clients, and for the Firm," said Ramona Nee, the next Executive Partner of Weil. “Rising pressures across the global economy, the rapid evolution of AI, the increasing complexity of cross-border situations — all of it demands a practice ahead of the curve. We made the deliberate decision to unify global oversight of this practice under a single leader because we believe the most consequential work of the next decade will require exactly that. Matt is the right person to lead that charge, and we expect this practice to set an even higher standard in the years ahead.”

“The firms that will lead the next decade are anticipating where clients are headed and building for that future before it arrives," said Jonathon Soler, Co-Managing Partner of Weil.  “We believe the restructuring market is entering a new era, and this appointment reflects our commitment to investing in the leadership, talent, and global platform that will define it.”

Weil's restructuring practice spans the full spectrum of complex matters, including landmark chapter 11 cases, creative out-of-court solutions, liability management exercises and bespoke cross-border insolvency work. With this appointment, the Firm enters its next chapter from a position of strength: a unified global practice, a deepened leadership team, a market leading bench of talented partners, and a clear line of sight to the work ahead.

The issues that impact us most don’t conform to borders. From dangerous medical products to addictive tech, as our world becomes more intertwined, so do its problems.

And so do its solutions.

Tom Cartmell has spent decades at the helm of some of the largest litigations in history. He has unflinchingly taken on Big Pharma and Big Tech from a mid-sized, Midwest law firm, securing more than a billion dollars in jury verdicts and settlements for his clients. Just as importantly, the cases he works on alter the behavior of the world’s largest corporations.

“I truly believe that litigation is a way that you can make positive social changes,” says Cartmell. “When you’re able to make those changes through litigation, that impacts society as a whole. Not just the United States either – it impacts the world.”

A founding partner of his Kansas City-based firm, Wagstaff & Cartmell, Cartmell has been representing individuals and public entities in national mass torts for more than 20 years. He was deeply involved in the Pelvic Repair System Products Liability Litigation MDL, litigating cases on behalf of women who were seriously injured when treated with defective surgical mesh in abdominal and transvaginal surgeries. He was appointed co-lead counsel of the Ethicon MDL and took on five bellwether trials; he and his team also handled more opt-out trials than any other firm in the country. By the time the MDL closed, it had meted out a historic $8B in settlements for many thousands of women nationwide.

He and his team also played an active role in the nationwide litigation against opioid manufacturers. Cartmell represented cities and more than two dozen counties throughout that process. He also led a team that built the case against Teva Pharmaceuticals, which helped lead to a settlement of more than $4B against the company. Then, he moved to the litigation that perhaps most closely resembles his current docket – JUUL. Cartmell and his firm represented 350 school districts in the litigation against vaping giants for their impact on teen health and the education system. JUUL and major investors and directors eventually agreed to a reported $1.7B global settlement, and Altria Group added an additional $232M.

Cartmell has continued addressing issues impacting young people. Recently, he’s been spending much of his time leading the highly publicized litigation against global social media companies like Meta, owners of Facebook and Instagram, as well as TikTok, Snap and Google’s YouTube. The cases allege that the companies’ products are deceptively designed to be addictive, leading to high rates of depression and anxiety among adolescents that impacts both individuals and the broader education system. Cartmell has been appointed to leadership roles in the MDL, as well as to the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee of the JCCP.

Of the billions of global users of these ubiquitous platforms, many are children and teens – including Kaley, a user of Instagram, Facebook and YouTube who argued that the platforms’ addictive properties led to her mental health struggles. Her case was a bellwether for the JCCP, and Cartmell served on the trial team, which was helmed by Mark Lanier of Lanier Law Firm. The Los Angeles jury found that the companies’ platforms harmed Kaley and ordered the companies to pay a combined $6M – a promising sign for plaintiffs soon to litigate a wave of cases alleging that these tech companies are responsible for users’ health. Reflecting on the trial win, Cartmell noted: “Mark Lanier was amazing to watch in trial. He tried an incredible case, and it was a pleasure to work with him.” 

Cartmell will be following up that win by taking point in multiple upcoming bellwether trials; his next trial will be a Tennessee Consumer Protection Act case against Meta on July 20. In early 2027, he’ll be leading the case on behalf of the Tucson School District in Tucson, Arizona. After that, he’ll be trying a personal injury case in L.A. – the last of the Trial Group 1 bellwethers in Los Angeles Superior Court.

In addition to compensation for users’ harms, the litigation also seeks to change these companies’ practices, including the design of their products – which would be a worldwide transformation.

“This is hugely important litigation that can help make positive change,” says Cartmell. “I want our team to dedicate our time and energy to seeing this through to the end.”

Cartmell is a member of the Lawdragon 500 Leading Lawyers in America, the Lawdragon 500 Leading Litigators in America and the Lawdragon 500 Plaintiff Consumer Lawyers. 

Lawdragon: Your next social media trial, on behalf of the state of Tennessee in Nashville, is coming up now. What's trial preparation looking like for you?

Tom Cartmell: My team and I are pretty bunkered in getting ready for that case. We're working closely with Tennessee assistant attorneys general Brian Phelps, Chris Dunbar and Matt Jansen. They're excellent lawyers and we have an impressive team that is working incredibly hard to be ready for trial.

LD: Looking at the recent L.A. trial win, what does that verdict speak to for the coming cases, even if your upcoming trial isn’t a personal injury case?

TC: The verdict is an excellent result for Kaley [the plaintiff] herself, and also for the litigation as a whole because of the message it sends. It speaks volumes that the jury found that both companies were negligent and intentionally designing their apps in a way that harms kids. 

Personal injury cases are all a little different, and the defense is going to try to blame the circumstances in each plaintiff’s life on anyone and everyone but them. But the liability evidence is incredibly strong, and the internal documents are very easy to understand. The jury’s message was clear. 

LD: You’ve worked on similar litigations, such as JUUL, where you also represented school districts. How do you view the overlap there?

TC: Both cases involve companies who are addicting kids. They're public nuisance cases, so the damage models are very similar. We work very hard to make sure that we really understand the circumstances in these schools. The administrators, teachers and students are very effective at explaining why there is a major problem for the whole educational process that needs to be addressed, and then they are very smart about understanding how to fix these problems in schools and how much it will cost. Administrations from these schools show the harms that they're having from loss of teacher time, to having to hire new mental health caregivers, to students who are unable to concentrate during class. All these things harm our schools, so there's a consistent thread there.

“It speaks volumes that the jury found that both companies were negligent and intentionally designing their apps in a way that harms kids.”

LD: Do you find that you are able to improve upon each litigation because of what you've learned in previous mass torts?

TC: Yes. We’ve learned a lot of things about public nuisance cases involving school districts in the JUUL litigation. We took one of the first school district cases to trial before Judge Orrick. Altria settled in the middle of trial right after we put on all of the evidence for San Francisco Unified School District, but we were able to visit with jurors after the settlement was announced. That allowed us to do a deep dive on our presentation of the evidence and the experts. So, coming into the Social Media MDL, as a team we looked at the lessons learned in the JUUL MDL and tried to improve our presentation of the evidence. We have a much better understanding of the effective ways to present the evidence to the jury now. I thought we did a great job in the JUUL MDL in the case against Altria, but we can do even better here.

LD: Do you remember the first mass tort you worked on?

TC: I do. There was an MDL in the Southern District of New York. It was called In re Ephedra Products Liability Litigation, and it was against dietary supplement companies. They sold over-the-counter products that included an ingredient called Ma Huang. This ingredient was a distant cousin molecularly to cocaine.

LD: Really?

TC: Yeah. These products were started by people literally in their basements. They were putting together these cocktails and calling them dietary supplements. They rev your heart up, so people were using them to work out.

I got a call from a lawyer who wanted to refer me a case for a young Marine who was going on his normal 45-minute run in the summer in St. Louis. He had taken Metabolife and gone for his run – and he had a heart attack and died. He was, I think, 27 years old and he had two young kids. So I started looking into that. I did a lot of research and sure enough, there had been a consolidation of these cases in the Southern District of New York. So, I reached out to some of the lead counsel in that case, specifically Jayne Conroy. I really didn't have any understanding of how these mass torts worked, and Jayne was so nice to me and took me under her wing.

LD: So that set you on a trajectory of continuing this work?

TC: It did. I made some friendships within that litigation. Not long after that was the Vioxx litigation and the Celebrex Bextra litigation. The Celebrex Bextra litigation was the first time I ever applied for a steering committee. That case was in front of Judge Breyer pending in the Northern District of California. Judge Breyer was, to this day, one of the most amazing judges I've ever seen.

LD: But you started on the defense side. Tell me about that.

TC: Right. When I graduated law school, I went to a big defense law firm. At the time it was called Blackwell Sanders. The head of litigation at that firm was named Tom Wagstaff.

LD: Ahh. The founding partner of your firm now.

TC: Yes. We worked together at Blackwell Sanders for three years and I worked under him. He was handling primarily medical malpractice defense cases, and he had a ton of business and was in trial a lot. That allowed me to at a young age go to trial quite a bit during those first three years. He was a tremendous mentor to me. Great trial lawyer; known in Kansas City as one of the best trial lawyers. He taught me almost everything I know, frankly.

Regulation sometimes is very slow and sometimes it doesn't happen at all, but litigation can change the risk-benefit analysis for these companies.

LD: And your dad, who was also a lawyer who moved from defense to plaintiffs’ work, knew him as well, right?

TC: That's right. My dad had actually had litigation against him and told me, “This is a really great trial lawyer who would be a great mentor.”

LD: That's great. And fairly early on in the life of the new firm you switched to the plaintiffs’ side. Was that always your plan?

TC: That was my plan. My dad was an excellent trial lawyer for plaintiffs who started his career at a defense firm, and I wanted to follow in his footsteps. Out of law school it made sense to get really good experience at a big law firm that could get you into trial and really hone your skills. After three or four years, I wanted to leave and go do plaintiffs’ work with that background of having already tried a bunch of cases so that I knew what I was doing.

LD: How did the conversation about starting the firm go?

TC: We had a Christmas party at Blackwell Sanders in 1996. Blackwell Sanders was growing like crazy. It had become a very big firm with lots of different offices around the Midwest. I remember Tom Wagstaff looking around and saying, "This place has changed. It's just not the same anymore – the small, personable, team atmosphere." I said, "Well, you could start your own firm and have that atmosphere if you wanted to." And he sort of laughed it off. I gave him trouble about it after that for several months and then not long after that he said he was going to go start his own firm and take me with him.

He knew because we worked so closely together that I really wanted to represent individuals philosophically. Honestly, I loved representing doctors and hospitals, too. It gave me a lot of experience, the doctors were very noble and the hospitals I represented were amazing. To this day I still represent the local children's hospital in Kansas City and from time to time I still represent doctors. 

LD: Interesting. And back to mass torts, how have you seen them change since you first started working in that area?

TC: I would say the biggest change in my experience from when I started back in the early 2000s is likely that it's a much more diverse group of lawyers. I think it's a really great and very necessary change. When I started in mass torts, frankly, it seemed like it was mostly a bunch of old white guys. Later on, there started to be a movement to be more diverse in the appointments by judges. It's made these mass tort cases from the plaintiffs’ perspective much better – no question in my mind.

LD: When you're working on these sprawling cases, how do the individual stories stand out to you?

TC: Well, a lot of people question working in mass torts because you might lose the personal relationships with your clients.

LD: Right. I know you all focus on not doing that.

TC: Yes. One of our firm's focuses is to continue to keep those relationships with clients. Looking back, I would say the key moments that have kept me involved in mass tort litigation have involved the settlements or the trials that have been life-changing for the individual clients. Mass torts provide an avenue for people who never could take on these billion-dollar corporations on their own. We've had some amazing battles against the biggest corporations in the country, and that gets in your blood.

LD: And speaking of the lawyers with your firm, tell me a bit about the team there and what you find most fulfilling about working with them.

TC: We focus on developing lawyers who really try cases. They have experience on their feet in courtrooms. A lot of lawyers say they've tried cases, but they really haven't tried a substantial number. So we have I think a really great group of younger lawyers who have the experience in courtrooms on their feet trying cases substantially – taking witnesses and handling all the pretrial discovery. I love that about our team. It allows us to get involved in more great cases. More than ever, I want our firm to focus on cases that really do have positive social impact on society. My partners believe in that as well.

“We've had some amazing battles against the biggest corporations in the country, and that gets in your blood.

LD: Tell me more about that social impact.

TC: Regulation sometimes is very slow and sometimes it doesn't happen at all, but litigation can change the risk-benefit analysis for these companies. For example, in the social media cases, part of the damages that we're claiming are things like injunctions and telling them they need to change the design of their products. That was the same thing that was being asked of the opioid manufacturers and sellers. When you’re able to make those changes through litigation, that impacts society as a whole. Not just the United States either – it impacts the world.

LD: And remind me, do you have kids as well?

TC: I do. I have two kids.

LD: So working on these cases involving school districts, from JUUL to social media, is that impactful for you as a father, as well?

TC: It definitely is. My kids are grown now. My son is actually in law school. He's 28 and my daughter is 23, but they both grew up during sort of this social media epidemic, I call it, frankly, and during the JUUL epidemic. So I've had a strong personal interest in both of those cases because I've seen how it's affected kids my own kids' age. I feel strongly that that trying cases is an important part of what I do. It's extremely important that our system is a trial system. It’s the best system in the world.

At least if you were to jump in your pickup truck and drive.

But if you are Robin C. Gibbs and his team of antitrust aces at Houston’s Gibbs & Bruns, both are clients to be championed in epic antitrust battles – advocating for the rice farmers against a milling company suppressing their prices and for merchants who claim Visa and Mastercard conspired to inflate so-called swipe fees.

Inspired by a plaintiff lawyer uncle from San Antonio, Gibbs made his way to The University of Texas School of Law, from which in 1971 he joined the legendary antitrust practice helmed by Harry Reasoner at Vinson & Elkins. Houston was a hotspot of ambitious trial lawyers in those days, and just 12 years later, Gibbs would form his own firm, which has eclipsed his wildest dreams of creating a high-stakes business litigation boutique.

A crown jewel is its antitrust practice, hard hewed in agriculture and energy through years of fallow enforcement only to burst forth in the last decade as technology and global business exploded the lens on the intersection of law and competition.

Call it the law of unintended consequences. Kind of like sticking a drill in the raw Texas earth. Anything can happen.

“We hung up our shingle. We were generalists. Whatever ails you, we should have the skills to fix it,” Gibbs says, in his remarkably understated fashion. “But, coincidentally, antitrust did play an important role, both in economics, internally, and in our visibility because we were always with or against all the big commercial firms in the country.”

Gibbs parlayed his early years in insurance defense litigation – forming relationships and building courtroom know how – into referrals from V&E, Baker Botts and others. He created a client-rich environment in the halcyon days of Texas’ emerging juggernaut of a plaintiff bar in the ‘70s and ‘80s, defending and suing for entrepreneurs in real estate, technology and energy as the economy boomed, busted, then turned right around and did it all over again.

Gibbs’ early vision took hold in the exceptional people he judiciously selected to practice with him – attorneys who would go on to distinguish themselves as formidable trial lawyers in their own right. Among them are Kathy Patrick and Barrett Reasoner who led the firm’s most recent high profile antitrust battle against Visa and Mastercard. In this case, Gibbs & Bruns represented a group of 17 national retailers, including Target, the TJX Companies, Macy’s, Kohl’s, Staples, Office Max and Office Depot, JCPenney, Saks, Abercrombie & Fitch, Luxottica, Chico’s, Big Lots Stores, Victoria’s Secret and others in individual antitrust actions against Visa and Mastercard. 

The plaintiffs sought over $20B in damages – which would be trebled if plaintiffs were successful at trial.

These plaintiffs alleged that, for decades, Visa, Mastercard and their card-issuing banks conspired to restrain competition and fix interchange prices – the fees merchants pay every time customers use credit or debit cards at their stores across America. According to the plaintiffs, those banks instituted anti-competitive rules and fixed interchange pricing when they owned Visa and Mastercard and kept those rules in place after Visa and Mastercard went public in the early 2000s. These agreements, plaintiffs alleged, restrained trade and caused them to pay billions of dollars in supra-competitive interchange fees.

Patrick and Reasoner are a fearsome duo for many reasons, she a product of rural Texas, he the son of Texas’ king of antitrust, Harry Reasoner. Patrick’s years at Harvard Law School enforced her desire to use the law to help people treated unfairly. Barrett, schooled at UT, was taught by a legendary antitrust professor, Lino Graglia (as was Gibbs), who believed no antitrust litigation was good antitrust litigation.

The seeming birds of two different feathers joined up in the early ‘90s. Patrick joined the then-seven-lawyer firm in 1986, just three years after Gibbs opened its doors. Reasoner followed in 1992, after a lap through the prosecutor’s office.

The firm represented a failed Texas grocer, Handy Andy, who had been driven out of business by a rival, H-E-B. And both remember teaming up with an Italian marine construction company to defeat allegations it conspired with competitors to rig bids for heavy-lift derrick barges.

“One of the best things about antitrust is learning about parts of the economy that you never knew existed and the boundaries of conduct reached by the law,” Patrick says. “The [marine] case that we handled broke ground in what would become the standard limiting the extraterritorial application of the antitrust laws.”

The duo has collaborated on some of the firm’s biggest successes, while each has also notched significant wins for plaintiffs and defendants in trade secrets, oil and gas, and financial disputes. When they combine – as they did in leading the firm’s Visa/Mastercard efforts – it’s a rare one-two of heart and head that gets results.

“These antitrust cases are absolutely complicated, but they require the same sorts of skills,” says Reasoner. “Trying to simplify it and tell a story that's going to resonate with the jury. Once you get past all the complicated aspects, there are fundamental stories of right and wrong that we think can be told in these cases and that we've developed a skillset in telling.”

The Visa and Mastercard litigation began in 2005 as a class action, with merchants and trade associations claiming the card networks and their member banks colluded to fix interchange or “swipe” fees at artificially high levels. While many participants settled over the years, the Vorys law firm created a coalition of retailers that opted out of the agreement, with Gibbs & Bruns joining as lead trial counsel in 2019. 

The plaintiffs contended that Visa and MasterCard essentially forced merchants to pay for Visa and MasterCard’s marketing to accept the cards, Patrick explains. She added that these interchange fees that merchants pay are their third-largest expense. “Our clients alleged it was a price-fixing conspiracy because if a merchant wanted to accept any card, it had to accept every card, no matter how much it costs them to do that.”

“Just think about a discount merchant, where they're dealing with very thin margins on the clothing they sell,” Patrick says. “If two percent or more of your cost of that transaction goes to accepting the credit card, you can't really make enough money to be stable.”

Denise Drake joined the firm in 2017 after clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Drake helped craft the opposition to the motions for summary judgment filed by Visa and MasterCard, which the court denied after finding triable issues of fact – rulings that preserved core liability theories and cleared a path to trial. “What was so exciting for me about being a part of drafting those briefs was how much they were on the cutting edge of the recent developments in antitrust law,” Drake says.

Gutierrez explained the team was making the final sprint to trial – taking dozens of depositions, preparing for hundreds of witnesses expected over the course of trial, and crafting a strategy to distill a decades-long dispute and dense economic issues into a narrative that a lay Manhattan jury could parse and understand.

Throughout 2025, the firm helped clients in the group resolve their claims against Visa and Mastercard. Staples, Target, Kohl’s, JC Penney’s Luxottica, Abercrombie & Fitch, Big Lots and others reached settlements in the first part of the year. Over the holidays and into 2026, the firm resolved the claims of the remaining plaintiffs, who dismissed their claims only weeks before trial was slated to begin in the Southern District of New York. 

Just down the hall, Patrick is also leading Google’s defense in Texas against seventeen states that are challenging Google’s advertising technology platform. Joining her on the case are Ayesha Najam, another Harvard Law graduate who joined the firm in 2005; and Charles Rosson, a rare lateral from V&E in 2017.

“We are at the cutting edge between technology and antitrust,” says Aundrea K. Gulley, who joined the firm in 2001. Gibbs & Bruns recently defended automotive software retailer Reynolds & Reynolds Co. in a cutting-edge antitrust case in which Authenticom, a data integration service provider, alleged Reynolds conspired with dealership software firm CDK Global to restrict access to dealer data. Partner Justin Patrick recalls that the firm “dedicated a very significant portion of our energy in the case to prosecuting counterclaims under the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act], under the Copyright Act, under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Strategically, that was a way to cut off a lot of the [plaintiffs'] antitrust claims. And it was a way to put the other side on trial. Even if you are the defendant, you find some issue where you can put the other side on trial.”

Gulley envisions the antitrust space of the future will “focus more on First Amendment-type IP issues and property rights when it comes to technology … software is private intellectual property. It can cost billions to develop. When it works, it becomes extremely valuable to customers. But it is also coveted by those who want the same benefit without the burdens of the investment and innovation required to gain them. What is the role of private property? And what role does the government have in a market where innovation is happening rapidly? You will see a lot more of those issues which will tumble into an antitrust problem at some point.”

“The reason we were in [the Authenticom] fight was because this data was valuable, and AI is just going to make that even more true,” observes partner Brice Wilkinson.

One thing is certain: Gibbs & Bruns lawyers seem to thrive on the legal twists and challenges that define antitrust work. Long nights spent in paper-strewn war rooms – strategizing, stress testing theories, and refining arguments – translate into a quiet confidence that shows in how this battle-tested team guides clients through complex disputes that unfold over years.

Najam and Rosson both emphasize that lean trial teams foster a high degree of immersion and collaboration. “When the team is small, everyone is closely engaged with the facts and strategy, and over time that shared focus naturally aligns the group and allows each person to complement the others’ strengths in a way that strengthens the overall case – and ultimately better serves the client.”

Gibbs himself modestly marvels at the “steady expansion” of the firm he co-founded over 40 years ago. “We got here by working very hard, taking risks where it was appropriate,” he says. “One of the things, comparing our firm today with where it started, is that in addition to the size of the practice and the quality of people, the quality of life has been a real centerpiece of our culture that we've tried to build here. We keep the firm relatively small, it's always growing, but it grows very gradually.”

This is the inaugural edition – celebrating white-collar wonders, enforcement experts and investigative icons. We established this guide in recognition of the booming business of investigations of all sorts – by Congress, governmental agencies, internal inquiries at companies, universities and nonprofits. And nothing goes more hand-in-hand with investigations than a standout practice in white-collar defense.

For many of these stars, their work is a success when no one ever learns of their efforts. They are the Houdinis who can make bad things disappear. In other cases, they are called upon to help their client through the harsh glare of public inquiries or trial, in which a cool composure can win the day.

Shawn M. Wright is co-chair of the Litigation department at Blank Rome. A Washington, D.C. powerhouse, Wright specializes in white-collar criminal defense, with a special focus on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, international anti-corruption laws, criminal antitrust, public corruption, congressional investigations and government contracts matters including False Claims Act litigation. She has conducted internal investigations into allegations involving trade sanctions violations for a Fortune 100 Corporation; represented a pharmaceutical company in a criminal antitrust investigation of the generic pharmaceutical industry by the Justice Department and State Attorney General’s office; and conducted an internal investigation of potential fraud for a global manufacturer of high-tech military and police products.

Sean Hecker is founder of Hecker Fink, the elite firm fusing litigation and public interest. Based in New York, he has built a huge reputation as a trial lawyer focused on white-collar criminal defense, government and internal investigations, complex civil litigation, and regulatory compliance. Among Hecker’s many notable representations, he won an acquittal for Robert Bogucki, a former head of Barclays’ foreign exchange desk who was accused of orchestrating a $6B fraud scheme. He also won dismissal of all charges brought in New York against Miami-based lawyer David Macey for allegedly bribing U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials and represented pro bono Kilmar Abrego Garcia in a criminal prosecution in Tennessee, in which the charges were dismissed on the basis of vindictive prosecution.

Antonia M. Apps is a partner and co-chair of the Litigation department at Paul, Weiss in New York. Formerly a star federal prosecutor, she is also a lecturer on White Collar Law at Harvard Law School. She held numerous senior roles at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including Deputy Director of Enforcement, in which she helped oversee its enforcement activities and manage a 1,300-person division handling the agency’s investigations and trials. In private practice at another firm she represented a global asset manager in connection with antitrust and consumer protection investigations by multiple state attorneys general concerning ESG practices and BlackRock in SEC and DOJ investigations arising from investment of a BlackRock closed-end mutual fund of $75M to finance a film distribution company.

We selected the honorees for this guide from our unique process combining journalistic research, robust submissions and peer discussion. Members of the Hall of Fame are denoted with an asterisk.

The best lateral moves can look seamless from the outside. A partner joins a new firm. A practice expands. A market shifts. A press release goes out. 

Sara Zahoryin knows how much strategy, judgment and trust it takes to make something so complex appear smooth from the outside. 

As a partner in CenterPeak’s Houston office, Zahoryin advises law firms and partners through decisions that are strategic, competitive and often deeply personal. Behind every successful move is a set of questions that can reshape careers, client relationships and entire practices. Firms are looking for talent that can deepen existing strengths, serve clients in new ways and open doors the firm could not have opened on its own. Partners are looking for the platform, culture and strategic fit that will allow them to grow their books, serve clients more effectively and build the next chapter of their careers with confidence. 

“In many ways, law firm partners run their own businesses within a business,” Zahoryin says. “They need both the innate ambition and the right infrastructure to compete at the highest level. Helping them find that alignment is deeply rewarding.” 

Zahoryin’s role is to help both sides see clearly. She cuts through assumptions, translates priorities and helps firms and partners understand what they might be capable of together. That work requires market knowledge, discretion and a rare kind of candor – the ability to show clients what is possible, what is realistic and what is actually right for them. 

A member of the Lawdragon 100 Global Leaders in Strategy & Consulting, her approach is rooted in honesty, transparency and a belief that clients know when an advisor is genuinely invested in their success. 

“At CenterPeak, what truly sets us apart is the depth of our relationships, both with firm clients and with the individual partners who make up those firms,” Zahoryin says. “That dual perspective is something you simply can't manufacture.”  

For Zahoryin, the work comes down to trust: the kind built over years, tested in high-stakes moments and essential to helping firms and partners cut through complexity, recognize the right move and make it possible. 

Lawdragon: Can you describe for our readers the types of services you provide within the legal industry and to whom? 

Sara Zahoryin: We are trusted advisors to law firms and to law firm partners. Our charge is to attract and secure the best legal talent in the market for our clients – assessing needs, identifying the right fit, and connecting top partners with the right firms. The desired outcome is always a win/win for both the firm and the partner. 

LD: What are some aspects about this work that you find professionally satisfying?  

SZ: This one is easy to answer. There is nothing quite like improving the trajectory of someone's career and, by extension, their life. The individuals who make up the large law firms we serve are remarkable. They carry exceptional intellect, an entrepreneurial drive, and real family responsibilities. In many ways, law firm partners run their own businesses within a business. They need both the innate ambition and the right infrastructure to compete at the highest level. Helping them find that alignment is deeply rewarding. 

LD: What trends are you seeing in the market right now? 

SZ: The lateral market is more active than ever. With the explosion of lateral moves across the industry, the competition for the best and brightest candidates has never been more intense, and that keeps us very busy. 

LD: What are the key challenges in guiding a lateral move to a successful outcome? 

SZ: The challenges most often come down to preconceived notions on both sides. When you're working to bring two parties together, each comes in with assumptions about what the other wants or values. Our job is to cut through that noise: to clearly convey the practical perspectives and goals of each party and then make the case for what a combined force can achieve together. 

Our job is to cut through that noise: to clearly convey the practical perspectives and goals of each party and then make the case for what a combined force can achieve together. 

LD: Was there an early experience or mentor who really helped shape the course of your professional life? 

SZ: My mother, Janet Downie, was one of the founders of Johnson Downie, which is now part of CenterPeak. I grew up around the service business because of her, and so much of what I know today, I learned by watching her. She had a tireless work ethic, and she carried it all with integrity, grace, and a smile. 

LD: How has legal recruiting changed since the early part of your career? 

SZ: Like the world-class firms we serve and the exceptional partners we place, the competition has grown considerably. We respond to that the only way we know how: by committing to being the best we can be, every single day. 

LD: What characteristics does it take to thrive in your work? 

SZ: Honesty and transparency. Clients can sense when someone is genuinely invested in their success versus just moving a deal forward. Leading with real intention makes all the difference. 

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

SZ: Just use us – every time. Everything will be okay. 

LD: Easy! 

SZ: Truly. You’ve got to find a firm you genuinely trust, one that shares your values, and invest in building a real relationship with them. When that foundation is there, great things can happen. 

LD: How do you think about leadership in this stage of the firm’s growth? 

SZ: One of the real challenges in leadership is knowing when to step back from the corporate targets, meet people where they are, and focus on what actually moves the needle. We accomplish extraordinary things when we're aligned and pulling in the same direction. 

LD: What distinguishes CenterPeak’s approach in a competitive legal recruiting market? 

SZ: At CenterPeak, what truly sets us apart is the depth of our relationships, both with firm clients and with the individual partners who make up those firms. We have spent decades building genuine understanding on both sides of the equation: the pressures law firms face at an institutional level and the very personal, high-stakes decisions that partners navigate in their own careers. That dual perspective is something you simply can't manufacture.  

LD: Is there a cause or community commitment that is especially meaningful to you? 

SZ: I'm involved with several organizations focused on pediatric cancer research and support. Our son is a cancer survivor, so this cause is as close to our hearts as anything can be. It's not something I take lightly. It's personal in every sense of the word. 

The former Federal Reserve chairman, whose legendary opacity helped him build a reputation as a markets-whisperer, told a Senate committee in 1987 that becoming a central banker had taught him the importance of mumbling incoherently.

“If I seemed unduly clear to you,” he continued, “you must have misunderstood what I was saying.”

That, of course, was in an era where network television, print newspapers and magazines were the primary gatekeepers of information. Today’s world, where communication is both instantaneous and ubiquitous but often less than accurate, demands more.

Government institutions and titans of industry alike find themselves obligated to convey information to a diverse array of stakeholders quickly and clearly, fueling a surge in demand for expertise in doing so. Global strategic communications and stakeholder-engagement firm TLG Communications is expanding its financial communications business to meet the moment.

It's a vital service, the firm says, since companies that fail to supply the information stakeholders need risk losing their ability to shape the narratives driving financial markets and falling prey to potentially devastating consequences.

“Today, companies are really navigating an environment where you need an always-on approach,” says Michael Crittenden, a senior managing director at TLG with a deep background in financial communications.

A former Wall Street Journal reporter and managing director at Mercury Public Affairs, he joined the firm in 2022. Early last year, TLG added Ashley Schapitl, a 15-year government veteran whose most recent post was deputy assistant secretary for public affairs at Janet Yellen’s Treasury Department.

“One of the things that financial institutions really need in this day and age is longer-term management of issues that are always percolating below the surface,” she says. “Financial communications have had to adapt by tracking these issues and thinking about how they’re going to impact their business five years down the road if they come to the top of the regulatory or policymaking agenda because there's just a constant churn.”

Lawdragon: You obviously had a long career in government, Ashley. How does your insider’s perspective guide clients in this period of shifting regulation and market development?

Ashley Schapitl: It’s really important for industries and institutions to invest in long-term relationship building and education when interacting with a federal agency or legislators on Capitol Hill, even if their company or industry is not a focus at the moment. If there's a base of knowledge and a relationship, it really impacts how your interactions with either the lawmaker or the regulator will go if your industry or your company becomes of greater interest to either the Treasury Department or Capitol Hill, depending on the situation.

Too often, institutions think that any outreach either to or from the government is necessarily a bad thing because it means you're under scrutiny in a way that you don't want to be. They don’t necessarily appreciate that these are government officials and career government servants who really just want to understand the issues facing the country and better understand the inner workings of companies and industries so that they are better informed when a crisis arises or when there's a novel regulatory or legislative issue that they need to manage. It behooves you as either a company or an industry to engage regularly and thoughtfully. That really pays off in the long run when something happens in the marketplace, because those regulators know who to call to ask questions. Then, they’re not just reading a headline and potentially overreacting to it but coming to an issue with a baseline of knowledge that makes your interaction better.

LD: Looking at your transition into being an advisor, what brought you to TLG?

AS: The things that I loved the most about working in government were working on a wide variety of matters at once and the challenge of being thrust into something different at any moment because of whatever was happening in the world. A good example at Treasury was the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank; that was something that happened on a Friday, and everyone spent the entire weekend working on it and then it dominated everyone's full workday for months. That’s not the way that everyone likes to work, but if you thrive in a workplace where no two days are the same, it’s fascinating. That was what I was looking for in my next step, and that is very much what we have at TLG. You're working on a wide array of issues for a wide array of clients, and you get that same ability to really stretch yourself as a professional and learn. That was really what drew me to TLG.

LD: Michael, you spent years at The Wall Street Journal covering global financial markets, banking and regulation before moving to the advisory side. How does that reporter's instinct inform the counsel you give clients? 

Michael Crittenden: Some of the same tools and approaches that make you an effective and successful reporter really carry over, especially on issues like financial markets, banking, communications and these big moments for corporations. Whether it's breaking news on the one hand or a client matter that arises, it's critical to understand the context, to be able to get deep in the substance, so that you can provide that clarity of narrative, approach and strategy that helps clients navigate crises. I had an amazing professor during my senior year in college who was a banking and finance reporter himself in a previous life, so my journey really started in college with understanding how critical these issues are. They can feel very arcane, very obtuse, until you realize how important they are to our day-to-day lives – our ability to buy a house or rent an apartment or get a car or get a job. All of these dynamics are driven by our financial markets. Once you realize the financial markets are made up of people who make investments in corporations in your backyard or in towns across the country, you see how that’s driving our day-to-day lives and understand how that affects prices and affects interest rates. All of that captivated me very early on, and it has served me well. Since then, it's been a passion of mine to figure out how we tell these stories in a smart way. As a reporter, that meant connecting the dots for someone who's opening bank accounts, reading about broader events and wondering, "What does that mean?" And now on this side, I’m giving advice to clients on how to translate these critical aspects of our economy to laymen and to different stakeholders.

LD: TLG has a wide array of clients, but do you have a typical client that you're working with?

AS: While we work with a lot of clients in the financial sector, they really run the gamut from more traditional banks to alternative asset managers and private equity.

MC: It’s more matter-specific than correlated to a particular profile of a firm. In today's environment, everyone is facing this new reality and understanding that it's not as simple as it was once perceived to be. In financial communications, it used to be that you had quarterly earnings, you had the occasional deal, you had your annual report, etc. Now, you need to understand all of your stakeholders, not just in a moment of need, but in advance. Across the board, especially in the financial space and capital markets broadly, you have people who understand that and so they're much more attuned to, “OK, I expect in the next six months – whether it's litigation, activist shareholder campaigns, M&A or other similar transactions – these business-critical moments that go beyond traditional communications and affect all aspects of achieving our business objectives.” That's when companies come to us because they need that strategic perspective. They need it not just on, “How are we going to pitch this to reporters?” but also, “How are we going to talk to regulators about this? How are we going to talk to our employee base?” To describe our clients holistically, they are people facing the most important business-critical and high-stakes moments who need that very insightful, strategic and savvy approach.

In a high-stakes moment that's going to define your organization for the next six, 12 or 36 months, how you communicate with stakeholders is going to be critical to success.

LD: Interesting. So, in terms of market differentiation and then differentiation of experience, what other capabilities does a firm need to have now that it didn't five or 10 years ago, and how does TLG stay on the cutting edge?

MC: A corporation that's going to achieve its business goals and thrive in this current environment needs a very interconnected approach to communicating across a range of stakeholders. People have traditionally thought communications was purely, "How do I deal with the media?" Communications is much more than that. Whether it's business, capital markets, regulatory or legal, communications have to be a critical component of how you approach decision making. In a high-stakes moment that's going to define your organization for the next six, 12 or 36 months, how you communicate with stakeholders is going to be critical to success.

LD: As media is becoming more siloed and bifurcated, how are businesses responding?

AS: One of the things that's especially important in financial communications is not only do you have your top-tier legacy media institutions, but you also have alternate platforms such as financial podcasts or niche financial Substackers. We've always had trade publications that are much more focused on the ins and outs of the daily workings of financial institutions, but you now also have this whole other ecosystem that's very diffuse, in the sense that a policy Substacker, for instance, may decide to write about an aspect of your industry or your institution and the post can be read by policymakers and regulators. You need full visibility into how every single place that you are communicating publicly can impact other areas of the business. You might have an executive who speaks at a conference and the conference is recorded by people in the audience with their phone, for instance. There are just a lot more ways everything you're saying impacts the information environment in a way that wasn't true five to 10 years ago.

MC: The biggest trend is companies understanding that they need to meet audiences where they are, especially with important business-critical information that you really need to get to the right stakeholders. The key is understanding how to engage across mediums, across audiences in ways that will resonate and really get to those audiences versus traditional approaches where the playbook amounted to, "Well, if we do the press release, then the right people will eventually find it." Now it's much different. For example, you can have an organization do an hour-long webcast on a topic, then cut that down into one-minute clips that they can issue over LinkedIn. You can have direct-to-camera videos from leaders weighing in on market trends, long-form podcasts; there’s a whole cottage industry for CEOs and top leaders to talk about their businesses and their perspectives. These are all different mediums that 10, 15 years ago just weren't in the toolkit for many organizations.  

 There are just a lot more ways everything you're saying impacts the information environment in a way that wasn't true five to 10 years ago.

Think, for instance, about an activist shareholder campaign. Traditionally, how would that play out? Well, they'd buy up some shares, build a position, communicate it to the marketplace, and that would be the process. Just look back at the '80s, with “Barbarians at the Gate”; there's all these amazing moments in Wall Street history of these monumental activist campaigns and how they played out. But from a communications perspective, all of the tactics, all the capabilities we've discussed, now you have to realize the other side can also deploy those. So it's all about understanding in the landscape out there, if it's an activist campaign, if it's an M&A deal, unsolicited takeover, the means of communication, the means of shaping perception and shaping understanding across stakeholder audiences have basically had rocket fuel thrown on them. There are so many different channels that you have to be aware of and you have to build into your strategy not just to support your objectives, but also to protect yourself from potential risks.

LD: Looking at TLG, there's been dramatic growth in the last year or two, including with your addition to the team, Ashley. So how is the financial communications practice growing and how is that growth necessary, not just for the firm, but for the current moment that we're in for corporates and institutions?

AS: We’ve grown financial services significantly over the last year and worked on many high-profile matters that have dominated the headlines. Particularly where we have been very valuable to clients – and one of the reasons the practice has grown significantly over the past year and a half – is that I don’t think we’ve seen a policy and regulatory environment that’s this complex, unpredictable or rapidly changing in many, many years. It's something a lot of institutions are trying to navigate. Given our expertise in communicating across stakeholders and doing long-term issues management and being able to tackle crises as they arise, our core specialties have been really needed.

MC: If you think about these business-critical or bet-the-organization moments, whether it's an executive transition, a market-moving development that management could not have predicted, or a regulatory inquiry, these are areas where the stakes really are the highest and the margin for error is very, very small. These are the moments TLG has always excelled in and is increasingly bringing our expertise to bear in this sector, whether it's private credit,  private equity, global financial institutions. These are the moments where organizations need this advice and they need to hear it from people who have that expertise from having lived it, because these are moments that will define an organization for the next one, five to 10 years.

Let’s begin with the fact that ought to have ended this argument long ago. Women have made up roughly half of law school entrants for more than a quarter of a century. In the United States they are now a majority of the profession; recent NALP figures put women at just over 51 percent of lawyers. In England and Wales they have been the majority of practicing solicitors for years. The pipeline is not the problem, and it has not been the problem for a generation.

And yet the seats that carry real power and profit remain stubbornly male. In the U.S., the share of equity partners who were women sat at 15 or 16 percent every single year from 2006 to 2012, then crept upward by roughly a point a year to reach about 22 percent by 2020. Take the narrower, harder measure and the picture is bleaker still: NALP’s 2024 data put female equity partners at under 14 percent of all partners in two-tier firms. Women occupy a low‑teens percentage of firm leadership roles in many surveys. In the UK, women now account for roughly 37 percent of all partners, a figure that sounds like progress until you notice where they are not. According to analysis drawing on Financial Times data, four in five partners hired into corporate and finance teams between 2019 and 2024 were men, and only 15 percent of new private equity partners in London across five years were women. Women are entering partnership ranks in greater numbers, but they remain underrepresented in the highest‑billing deal teams and equity leadership that drive firm profits.

None of this is for want of trying. The roll-call of initiatives is long and, taken one by one, often genuinely thoughtful. The Mansfield Rule. The Law Society’s Women in Law Pledge. Promotion targets and gender quotas for partner rounds. Sponsorship and mentoring programs. Affinity networks. Unconscious-bias training. Enhanced and equalized parental leave. Agile, hybrid and part-time working. Returner schemes. Mandatory gender pay gap reporting since 2017. Diversity officers, diversity consultants, diversity committees, diversity charters. Most firms have adopted most of these. Plenty have adopted all of them. And the dial has barely shifted. As one of the authors of the long-running NAWL survey put it years ago, the results show very little progress after years of very little progress. That sentence could be reprinted, unchanged, almost every year since.

So the question is not whether firms have tried. It is why so much sincere effort has yielded so little. And here the comfortable answer and the correct answer part company.

The wrong diagnosis

The conventional explanation is “culture”: unconscious bias, old-boys’ networks, a hidebound profession slow to modernize. There is truth in that, but it mistakes a symptom for the disease. Bias is not a film that settles on top of an otherwise neutral structure, to be wiped away with enough training and goodwill. In a law firm, the structure is the bias, encoded directly into the economics. Two mechanisms do almost all of the work, and neither has been touched by a generation of initiatives.

The billable hour

The billable hour measures time rather than client value or outcomes; it skews incentives toward uninterrupted availability. That single design choice quietly decides who can win. A system that rewards raw hours rewards, above all else, the person with the fewest competing claims on their time – and historically and overwhelmingly that person is a man without primary caring responsibilities.

The billable hour measures time rather than client value or outcomes; it skews incentives toward uninterrupted availability. That single design choice quietly decides who can win.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. Industry data suggests lawyers manage fewer than three billable hours in a typical eight-hour day, which means hitting a 2,000-hour annual target requires sixty-hour weeks before anything done at home is counted, and 2,000 is a floor rather than a ceiling at the high end. A recent survey found roughly two-thirds of attorneys say billable-hour pressure damages their mental health, a figure that rose between 2024 and 2025. Women leave large firms at close to twice the rate of men. The ABA’s own research into lawyers who are parents and carers, drawn from a survey of more than eight thousand practitioners, documents what it calls a maternal wall: mothers far more likely than fathers to face demeaning comments, withheld development opportunities and denied raises.

Crucially, the hour is also the unit against which every alternative is measured and found wanting. A lawyer who reduces her hours to raise children is not judged against some abstract standard of contribution. She is measured, in six-minute increments, against colleagues with no comparable demands at home. Part-time and flexible working, the policies firms reach for first, do not solve this. They simply let a woman pursue the same impossible number on a pro-rata basis, with less visibility, less of the high-value work that flows to those who are always available, and a quiet question mark over her commitment. The target never changes. Only her odds of meeting it.

The partnership tournament

Which brings us to the second structural barrier: the up-or-out partnership tournament. Its design is almost perfectly calibrated to exclude women. The decisive years, when associates must out-bill, out-network and out-originate their peers to win one of a handful of slots, fall precisely on the years of childbearing. And childbearing is only the most visible of the competing claims on those years. The same window, stretching from the late thirties into the forties, is so often when women become the primary carers for ageing parents as well, frequently while they are still raising school-aged children of their own – a second shift laid over the first, arriving at the exact moment a partnership case has to be built and defended. The expectation that a woman will hold the family unit together, in all its forms, has loosened far more slowly than the expectation that she bill and originate like a partner. Partnership rounds are typically annual, fiercely contested and dependent on someone above retiring or leaving. As UK practitioners told Law360, the timing of a partnership case so often coincides with maternity leave that a strong candidate becomes, in the firm’s eyes, out of sight and out of mind, her business case suddenly looking thinner than a colleague who never stepped away.

Credit, once held, is hoarded. It accrues to incumbents, who are overwhelmingly white and male, while the “minders” and “grinders” who service the relationship and do the actual work – disproportionately women and lawyers of color – are systematically undervalued.

Then comes compensation, and the most quietly decisive mechanism of all: origination credit. Under “eat what you kill” and its modern variants, the partner credited with bringing in a client captures a large share of the revenue, often for years, sometimes under first-touch rules that pay out even if that partner never speaks to the client again. Credit, once held, is hoarded. It accrues to incumbents, who are overwhelmingly white and male, while the “minders” and “grinders” who service the relationship and do the actual work – disproportionately women and lawyers of color – are systematically undervalued. Reporting on these systems has documented women being excluded from credit even when they were instrumental in winning the business, and in some cases intimidated when they pressed for it. The result shows up cleanly in the pay data: the 2024 Major, Lindsey & Africa survey found male partners earning on average 29 percent more than their female counterparts, roughly $1.7M against $1.2M. The legal sector’s gender pay gap in the UK runs at around 26 percent, double the national average.

Why the initiatives could never work

Set these two engines side by side and the failure of a generation of effort stops being a puzzle. Every initiative is a bolt-on that leaves both engines running at full power.

Flexible working does not alter the hours target; it just rations visibility. Mentoring and sponsorship do not reallocate a single point of origination credit. Unconscious-bias training does not change who gets the high-margin matter or the institutional client. Promotion targets, absent any change to how partners are actually paid, tend to inflate the non-equity tier – more women admitted to a “partnership” that carries the title without the economics. Gender pay gap reporting, for all its value, illuminates the gap without diminishing its cause; firms themselves describe the reporting as a blunt instrument and, too often, a tick-box exercise, and several initially tried to exclude equity partners from the calculation altogether. One survey found that while 92 percent of legal professionals agreed the pay gap was a concern, 62 percent said fixing it was not a priority for their firm’s senior management, and 84 percent of female lawyers did not expect to see genuine pay equality in their working lives.

There is even evidence that the initiatives can be actively self-defeating. Research published through Columbia Law School describes a “non-virtuous cycle” in which hiring a few senior women at the top lets a firm project an image of progress while attention and resources to the internal pipeline quietly fall away, so that fewer women are recruited below. Diversity at the summit becomes a mask for thinning diversity beneath it. Mentoring, the perennial favorite, fares no better under scrutiny: research summarized by Stanford’s business school is blunt that traditional mentoring programs are not very successful, because firms cannot manufacture the informal relationships that actually drive advancement.

The part nobody wants to say aloud

Here is the uncomfortable core of it. Time‑based billing and origination‑weighted compensation are often linked to gender gaps in pay and leadership; while causation is complex, the economic incentives clearly favor those with uninterrupted time and portable origination credit. Profit-per-equity-partner, the number by which firms are ranked and managed, is a direct product of leveraged associate hours billed at a multiple of cost, and of concentrating origination and reward at the top. The billable hour and the partnership tournament are not unfortunate legacy features the profession has failed to get around to fixing. They are the business model.

When a quarter of the partner-track talent drains away before it ever reaches partnership, that is not a line in a diversity report. It is a quarter of the firm’s finest human capital walking out of the door.

Which means firms are not failing to change because they are foolish or ill-intentioned. They are behaving rationally. The initiatives of the past generation have, in effect, done one thing consistently: held the economic structure constant and varied everything else, to see whether sincerity, training, targets and good policy could deliver equity on their own. The results are now in. The answer is no.

That is also why the firms making real progress tend to be the ones that walked away from the standard model entirely – boutiques, consultant-model firms billing on value rather than time, and the female-led firms that women increasingly leave to start, precisely because the traditional structure could not hold them. The exodus is not a footnote to the story. It is the clearest possible verdict on it.

All of this should trouble firms, because the case has never really rested on idealism. Firms want their best people to stay. They do not want to lose their sharpest litigators and most capable dealmakers at the very moment those lawyers are coming into the prime of their careers. When a quarter of the partner-track talent drains away before it ever reaches partnership, that is not a line in a diversity report. It is a quarter of the firm’s finest human capital walking out of the door. This is a talent retention crisis – and any firm that files it under something softer is quietly impoverishing itself.

What would actually have to change

None of this is an argument for despair, and it is certainly not an argument that nothing can be done. It is an argument about where to aim. Genuine change does not run through another charter or another training module. It runs through the two structures themselves.

It means moving decisively away from the billable hour toward fixed-fee and value-based pricing that decouples reward from raw time on the clock. It means rebuilding partner compensation so that minding, supervising, mentoring, team-building and client stewardship are credited as real contributions rather than treated as charity – and putting hard sunset clauses on origination credit so that incumbency stops compounding indefinitely. It means promotion paths that do not collapse into a single up-or-out window timed to collide with people’s thirties. Those windows fall in the very years when so many people are also building young families that demand enormous reserves of time and energy. These are not soft cultural asks. They are changes to the firm’s plumbing, and they are difficult precisely because they touch the money. That difficulty is the whole point.

The verdict on a generation of initiatives is in. They were not too cautious or too few. They were aimed at the wrong target. Until firms are willing to confront the billable hour and the partnership tournament – the two things they have always treated as untouchable – the numbers will keep telling the same story, year after year, in language that no amount of good intention can edit.

Sources drawn on include the ABA Profile of the Legal Profession and the ABA Commission on Women’s report on lawyers who are parents and carers; NALP and NAWL data on equity partnership and retention; Law360’s UK law firm gender pay gap analysis; the Major, Lindsey & Africa Partner Compensation Survey; Financial Times analysis of partner hiring; the Next 100 Years Project; research published via Columbia Law School and Stanford Graduate School of Business; and Clio’s Legal Trends Report.

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