On The Merits
On The Merits takes you behind the scenes of the legal world and the inner workings of law firms. This podcast offers in-depth analysis on the latest trends, challenges, and opportunities shaping the business of law and the legal industry overall. You'll gain insights into how the latest government actions, policies, and business developments are impacting the industry and hear from leading attorneys, legal scholars, industry experts, and our own team of journalists as they share their perspectives on the forces driving change.
Episodes
August 5, 2025 • 11 mins
Fenwick & West's decision to seek equity in one of its tech startup clients is now, with the benefit of hindsight, looking like a stroke of genius.
Figma Inc. last week had a blockbuster IPO and Fenwick made money not only advising its client on going public, but also through the firm's ownership of almost 900,000 shares in the design and collaboration software company, according to Bloomberg Law reporter Brian Baxter. The value...
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August 1, 2025 • 16 mins
Susman Godfrey has shown it's willing to take on high-risk, high-reward lawsuits with unconventional fee structures. Its leaders say this risk appetite is ingrained in the firm's culture.
"When we vote to take a case, it is a case of the firm," Kalpana Srinivasan, a managing partner at the firm, said on our podcast, On The Merits. "You hear sometimes there may be other places where there are a couple of partners who are trying t...
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July 29, 2025 • 11 mins
Neal Katyal and Gurbir Grewal, lawyers who command well over $2,000 an hour for their services, are slashing their rates to defend two New Jersey municipalities against a Justice Department lawsuit over their "sancutary city" policies.
This on its own would be noteworthy, but what makes it even more interesting is that their law firm—Manhattan-based Milbank LLP—reached a deal with the White House earlier this year, pledging $100...
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July 24, 2025 • 10 mins
Junior lawyers can climb the ranks faster than ever before, according to DLA Piper leader Frank Ryan, but they also should think about checking their politics at the door.
Associates "need to be mindful of over rotating into politics," Ryan, the firm's global co-chair, said in the latest edition of Bloomberg Law's On The Merits podcast. "We live in an overly partisan world. Yes, you have strongly held beliefs—and, yes, those are...
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July 22, 2025 • 12 mins
Former Davis Polk associate Ryan Powers started writing op-eds for local newspapers earlier this year criticizing the Trump administration's agenda. A few months later, the Wall Street firm he worked for fired him.
Powers' story is one example of how some Big Law lawyers have had to make tough career choices since the president retook office.
On this episode of our podcast, On The Merits, Powers speaks with Bloomberg Law repo...
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July 18, 2025 • 17 mins
Herbert Washer pushed Wall Street's Cahill Gordon & Reindel to expand its business after taking the helm, but he doesn't see the century-old firm joining the ranks of Big Law's largest players.
"For us, the key has been to pick areas where we can be top of the market," said Washer, who took over from as Cahill’s sole leader last year. "You don't want to enter a market space where you're going to be the tenth most successful law...
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July 15, 2025 • 11 mins
Activist shareholders can make things difficult for the companies they target. But they represent a significant source of revenue for the law firms that represent those companies—and their shareholders.
Bloomberg Law reporters Drew Hutchinson and Andrew Ramonas recently dug through the data on which firms did the most work on shareholder fights in the first half of this year. And Hutchinson talks about what they learned on this ...
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July 10, 2025 • 10 mins
Latham & Watkins took the perch as Big Law's leading M&A dealmaker in the first half of the year, surging past rival Kirkland & Ellis as things started to look up for firms whose fortunes are closely tied to corporate transactions.
Many law firms were expecting a spike in M&A deals in the first quarter of this year, but that largely failed to materialize. Now, with 2025 half over, we're starting to see a lot more activity on thi...
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July 7, 2025 • 19 mins
McDermott Will & Emery just put the finishing touches on a big merger with another firm, and on today's On The Merits podcast, we speak to the firm's chairman, Ira Coleman, about the firm's audacious goals, why he thinks it's important to listen to everyone in the organization, and the firm's bet on tech.
"If you're going to put $30 million in AI this year, you have to have scale," he told podcast host Jessie Kamens. "You can't ...
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July 1, 2025 • 15 mins
Since the Supreme Court's affirmative action ruling, and especially since Donald Trump's anti-DEI campaign, many law firms have swiftly moved to alter or dismantle their programs promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI.
So where does that leave people like Oyango Snell, a full-throated, unapologetic advocate of DEI in the legal industry?
Snell is a former law professor who now runs a legal operations professional g...
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June 26, 2025 • 18 mins
The bar exam is in a state of flux. A new "NexGen" test is about to debut, while several states now offer licenses to attorneys who haven't taken the exam at all.
These bar exam alternatives, many of which originated as emergency pandemic measures, are proving successful in smaller states, like South Dakota and New Hampshire, and even some larger ones, like Arizona and Oregon. But a nationwide bar exam alternative is not on the ...
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June 24, 2025 • 17 mins
Don't call it "flyover country." The firm Foley & Lardner has seen success opening offices in mid-tier cities such as Nashville, Raleigh, N.C., and Salt Lake City over the past four years.
On today's episode of our podcast, On The Merits, Bloomberg Law's Roy Strom speaks with Foley's chairman and CEO, Daljit Doogal, about why he's taken his firm beyond the traditional Big Law power centers of California, New York, and D.C. He al...
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June 17, 2025 • 12 mins
We don't know who is running ads on podcasts advocating for anti-litigation finance legislation. But, given how many enemies the practice has among conservatives and big business, the list of potential culprits is huge.
Bloomberg Law reporter Emily R. Siegel wrote a story about these podcast ads, which call for restrictions on third parties who fund lawsuits in exchange for a cut of any awards they generate. The ads failed to di...
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June 12, 2025 • 18 mins
It's never a good look for a law firm to lose partners in bunches, and that's what's been happening at Paul Weiss in the past few weeks.
Some of the firm's high-profile litigators have announced their departures, following the deal it struck with the Trump administration to avoid a punitive executive order. Ironically, the firm negotiated the White House agreement—which includes a pledge to provide $40 million in free legal serv...
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June 10, 2025 • 14 mins
Brad Bondi, a lawyer at Paul Hastings and brother of the current Attorney General, failed yesterday in his bid to become president of the DC bar association. But criticisms and attacks from conservatives on these legal groups, at both the state and national level, will likely continue.
That's one of the takeaways from this week's episode of our podcast, On The Merits, in which Bloomberg Law reporter Tatyana Monnay talks about wh...
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June 3, 2025 • 17 mins
One would think that the Trump administration's pullback on enforcement across the federal government would mean fewer clients for attorneys to defend. But that would be overlooking another important law enforcer in our system: state attorneys general.
Karl Racine and Jason Downs, both partners at the firm Hogan Lovells, are bolstering their practice specializing in helping clients under scrutiny by state AGs, many of whom are a...
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May 29, 2025 • 14 mins
Being a summer associate at a law firm can be tricky. On the one hand, you want to be remembered; on the other hand, you don't want to be remembered for the wrong reasons.
On today's episode of our podcast, On The Merits, we hear from Kate Reder Sheikh, a partner in the associate practice group at Major, Lindsey & Africa, about the pitfalls that summer associates can fall into—from over-imbibing at company functions to trying to...
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May 20, 2025 • 14 mins
Dozens of law firms have sought to de-emphasize, or outright kill, their diversity initiatives since the Supreme Court's 2023 affirmative action decision—and especially since Donald Trump retook office this year and started issuing punitive executive orders that mention them.
However, one firm is now doing the opposite. Susman Godfrey announced last week it would expand its annual prize awarded to law students of color, even th...
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May 15, 2025 • 13 mins
We're starting to see the impact of a string of deals reached over the last two months between President Donald Trump and top law firms.
Some firms appear to be moving on—and even thriving—after pledging hundreds of millions of dollars in free legal services on causes backed by the White House to avoid punitive executive orders like those Trump has lobbed at others. At least three firms that made deals are primed to cash in on S...
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May 13, 2025 • 20 mins
The Trump administration's attacks on law firms are having ripple effects on the general counsel whose companies employ those firms.
Top attorneys at many large companies may be considering whether to switch the firms they use as outside counsel, according to Bloomberg Law reporter Brian Baxter. In some cases, GCs don't want to work with a firm that's under attack from President Donald Trump; in other cases, they may feel uncomf...
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