Magic Circle
Every Folio briefing story that mentions Freshfields, most recent first. Stories are sourced daily from a curated set of legal and business publications.
AI & Law · Wed, 11 Nov 2026
**Addleshaw Goddard** has signed a firmwide partnership with **Harvey**, giving more than 3,400 lawyers and staff across its European, Middle East and Asia offices access to the AI platform, while **Fieldfisher** has selected **Legora** for its 1,400 lawyers and business services professionals following a six-week pilot across UK and European offices. Addleshaw's managing partner Andrew Johnston described the Harvey deal as 'the most significant technology transformation in AG's long history as an innovator', with the firm committing to co-develop features alongside Harvey's product teams rather than simply deploying the platform firmwide. Kerry Westland, Addleshaw's Head of Innovation, cited Harvey's 'matter spaces' capability as a key differentiator and confirmed the firm will not run a dual Harvey-Legora stack. Fieldfisher's rollout will be led by its AI hub at Fieldfisher X in Berlin. The decisions extend a widening divide in **legal AI platform allegiances**: **Harvey** is already deployed at **A&O Shearman** and **Slaughter and May**; **Legora** is integrated at **Linklaters**; and **Freshfields** has partnered with Anthropic. **Hogan Lovells Cadwalader** made the unusual move of adopting both Harvey and Legora simultaneously, arguing no single AI solution can cover the demands of a modern international law firm.
AI & Law · Sun, 8 Nov 2026
**A&O Shearman** has announced a **$1.1 billion (£800 million)** investment in artificial intelligence over the next five years, representing more than 5% of the firm's annual revenue. The plan requires lawyers across every practice group to set aside at least 3% of their billable time to assist in developing specialist AI tools, placing legal professionals at the centre of the firm's technology build rather than relying on off-the-shelf products. Global managing partner **Hervé Ekué** framed the move as a decade-defining strategic bet: the firm intends to combine exceptional legal judgment with the speed and scale AI enables, delivered consistently across its global offices. The approach builds on several years of experimentation, including an early partnership with **Harvey**, an AI platform for legal work, which A&O Shearman began testing in 2022 and went on to become one of its earliest major law firm customers. The announcement heightens competition across Magic Circle and elite US firms. **Freshfields** earlier this year partnered with **Anthropic** to give nearly 6,000 staff access to the Claude AI models. A&O Shearman's latest move shifts the terms of that race: the question is no longer simply which firm has the best AI access, but which is willing to commit the most lawyer time and capital to building proprietary capability. The commitment to directing billable hours into internal tool development is commercially significant. It signals that A&O Shearman views AI development as a core business activity rather than a back-office function, and suggests the firm expects purpose-built, practice-specific tools to deliver a durable competitive advantage over firms relying on generic platforms.
AI & Law · Thu, 29 Oct 2026
**Freshfields** has secured a key role advising the **underwriters** in **Anthropic**'s anticipated **Nasdaq IPO**, with valuation estimates ranging from $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion. The work is led out of Freshfields' Silicon Valley office, continuing the firm's push into the US market following its role on the European side of SpaceX's $1.75 trillion-plus stock market debut earlier this year. **Wilson Sonsini** is advising Anthropic directly, while **Cravath** acts for the company's co-founders. **Orrick** and **Cleary Gottlieb** are handling matters spanning executive compensation and corporate governance. Anthropic has filed paperwork with US regulators ahead of the listing. The mandate extends an existing relationship: Freshfields and Anthropic struck a multi-year partnership earlier in 2026 to develop **legal AI tools**, deploying Claude across all 33 of the firm's offices for tasks including contract review and document drafting. The IPO would, if completed at the upper end of estimates, rank among the largest technology listings on record.
AI & Law · Wed, 7 Oct 2026
Former **Allen & Overy** global senior partner **Wim Dejonghe** has co-founded **Falcon**, an AI-powered law firm launched first in Belgium, with plans to expand to London, Paris, and Amsterdam. The venture, announced on 7 October 2026, is backed by **€1.5 million** in pre-seed funding. Falcon's model offers businesses up to six commercial contract reviews per month, including non-disclosure agreements and data-processing agreements (contracts governing how personal data is handled), for a flat fee of **€1,000** (approximately £800) per month. Documents are submitted via Slack or Microsoft Teams and reviews are returned the same day. The firm claims equivalent work at a traditional firm would cost between **€3,000 and €4,000** and take days or weeks. Despite the AI-first approach, every contract review is signed off by a qualified lawyer. Dejonghe has said clients still want the judgment of a lawyer alongside the speed AI provides. The team includes former **Freshfields** lawyer Rémy Bonnaffé and the founders of Belgian HR start-up Mbrella. Falcon is described as being in talks with potential founding lawyers in London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Dejonghe, who led the **A&O Shearman** mega-merger as A&O senior partner in 2023, frames Falcon as a direct challenge to the billable hour model, arguing that hourly billing passes firm inefficiencies on to clients and that AI makes a fixed-fee alternative commercially viable at scale.
AI & Law · Sun, 13 Sept 2026
**Latham & Watkins** has purchased its own **Nvidia**-powered servers, each fitted with multiple GPUs (graphics processing units, the chips that provide the computing power to run large AI models), to build and customise AI models entirely in-house. The move is described as a first for a major law firm. Rather than routing client data through external cloud providers such as OpenAI, Google or Anthropic, Latham's own engineers are using the hardware to adapt so-called open-weight AI models, which can be downloaded and fine-tuned on private infrastructure. The firm continues to use familiar tools including ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini alongside the in-house capability. Latham's chief information officer Rene Mendoza explained the rationale: 'Sometimes we may have information that is so sensitive, client information that we really want to protect, we don't want to put it to any cloud vendor.' The firm employs more than **900 technology specialists**, and the servers are housed in locked data-centre space accessible only to Latham staff. No acquisition cost has been disclosed, though a set-up of this scale, including hardware and specialist staff, can run to tens of millions of dollars annually. Michael Rubin, a Latham partner and chair of its **AI strategy committee**, noted that the number of technology specialists, innovation lawyers and AI-focused roles has grown significantly in recent years. The move deliberately reduces dependency on any single AI vendor. Other elite firms have taken different routes: **Kirkland & Ellis** is working with Palantir, **A&O Shearman** has partnered with Harvey, and **Freshfields** announced a partnership with Anthropic earlier in 2026.
Regulation · Fri, 4 Sept 2026
On 3 September 2026, the **Competition and Markets Authority (CMA)** published its final revised guidance on how it assesses merger efficiencies, closing a consultation that launched on 3 June 2026. The updated guidance is incorporated into the CMA's **merger assessment guidelines** and represents the authority's settled position on how merging parties can argue that a transaction generates efficiencies, such as cost savings or innovation benefits, sufficient to offset competitive harm. The consultation drew responses from a range of firms and organisations with direct expertise in UK merger control. Named respondents included **Clifford Chance**, **Freshfields**, and **Linklaters** among the law firms, alongside economic consultancies **Compass Lexecon** and **Frontier Economics**, advisory firm **AlixPartners**, **UK Finance**, the **In-House Competition Lawyers' Association (ICLA)**, **UK Private Capital**, the **American Bar Association** (Antitrust and International Law Sections), the **Association for Competitive Technology**, and academics including Gregory Werden and Farasat Bokhari. The breadth of the respondent list indicates the practical significance of efficiency arguments across sectors from technology to financial services. The finalised guidance signals the CMA's current thinking on what evidence parties must produce to support an efficiency defence and how that evidence will be weighed against the competition concerns a merger raises. For deal teams advising on large UK mergers, the updated guidelines set the evidentiary benchmark for Phase 1 and Phase 2 efficiency submissions.
Capital Markets · Fri, 14 Aug 2026
The **IFLR Middle East Awards 2026** shortlist names **A&O Shearman**, **White & Case**, and **Linklaters** across multiple **debt capital markets** and **sukuk** categories. Shortlisted transactions include the **Saudi Real Estate Refinance Company RMBS Sukuk** and the **Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Sukuk issuance**, with HSBC named as in-house counsel on both. **Baker McKenzie** and **Freshfields** appear in the Domestic category for the Gulf Navigation / Brooge Petroleum deal, alongside Hadef & Partners, Ibrahim N Partners, and Pinsent Masons. White & Case is sole adviser on the Sagasse Investment Company Direct Listing. The awards cover equity, debt, loan, and domestic deal categories across the Middle East region.
International · Tue, 28 Jul 2026
Two concurrent developments are reshaping the London legal market's talent and compensation landscape. **Gowling WLG** has raised newly qualified (NQ) solicitor salaries in its London office to **£108,000**, joining a crowded field of firms adjusting pay upwards to remain competitive in a tight lateral market. Separately, **Winston Taylor**, the firm created by the merger of Winston & Strawn and a UK counterpart, has set NQ pay at **£125,000** in London, positioning the combined firm at the upper end of the non-Magic Circle bracket. At the same time, **Freshfields** is facing departures of prominent European partners to US rivals. Leaders and business generators from the firm's Belgian and German offices have moved to **Latham & Watkins** and **Skadden** over the past eight months. Some of those partners had grown concerned that Freshfields' expensive partner hiring programme in the US, where annual partner pay can now exceed **$17 million**, is not generating commensurate revenue returns. Freshfields has tripled its US revenue to **£473 million** over the five years since its US expansion began. The two stories are connected by the same structural tension: US firms' higher pay scales are forcing all London-headquartered firms to raise compensation at every level, from NQ to partner, while simultaneously making it harder to retain the European talent that has historically funded those US ambitions. The Freshfields dynamic is particularly acute because the firm's US investment is both the cause of internal concern among European partners and a commercial imperative given the direction of the global legal market.
International · Mon, 27 Jul 2026
**Magic Circle** law firms including **A&O Shearman**, **Clifford Chance**, **Freshfields**, and **Linklaters** are slowing their US lateral hiring programmes as the competition for top American legal talent proves harder to win than anticipated, according to reporting by Financial News London. The piece, published on 26 July 2026, describes the City's elite firms as facing an uphill battle to make their stateside push a success. The Magic Circle's US expansion strategy, driven by the need to compete with elite US firms on the most significant cross-border transactions, has required substantial investment in New York and other US markets. Lateral hiring of high-billing partners from rival US firms has been the primary mechanism, but the costs are significant and the cultural integration challenges are well-documented. The Financial News report does not disclose specific headcount figures, deal flow data, or named partner departures. The framing is one of strategic recalibration rather than retreat, with the firms still committed to their US ambitions but adjusting the pace at which they are building out through lateral hires. For UK law students targeting Magic Circle firms, this recalibration has direct relevance: it means the competitive landscape for US-qualified lawyers and the most complex transatlantic mandates remains intensely contested, and firms are having to think carefully about which practice areas and geographies represent the best return on the investment required to secure top US talent.
International · Fri, 17 Jul 2026
**Uber Technologies** has agreed to acquire **Delivery Hero**, a Berlin-based food delivery company, in a transaction that values Delivery Hero at **$14.8 billion**. The deal is structured as two separate transactions. Uber plans to acquire Delivery Hero's operations in 50 markets. Investment firm **SSW Partners** will separately acquire 14 other Delivery Hero markets for approximately **$1.6 billion**, including operations in Spain, Austria, Norway, and Sweden. Ten Big Law firms are advising across the transaction. **Freshfields** and **Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz** are steering Uber in the main transaction, while **Cooley** is guiding Uber in connection with its financing. The deal brings together one of the world's largest ride-hailing and delivery platforms with a major European and global food delivery network, and the multi-jurisdiction structure of Delivery Hero's operations across 64 markets in total explains both the deal complexity and the breadth of the advisory panel. The involvement of **Freshfields** in a flagship cross-border technology acquisition underscores the firm's continued positioning in high-value transactional mandates following its recent strategic moves.
Banking & Finance · Thu, 16 Jul 2026
A **Freshfields** partner based in London has left the firm to join **Simpson Thacher and Bartlett's** London office as co-head of its European financial services and funds regulatory team. The move is one of the more prominent lateral transfers in the London market in recent weeks, occurring against a backdrop described as a volatile lateral hiring environment in which **Kirkland and Ellis** and **Paul Hastings** are frequently at the centre of activity. The departure touches a practice area, European financial services and funds regulation, that sits at the intersection of banking regulation, asset management compliance, and EU regulatory law, making it a high-demand specialism as firms compete to advise on **FCA** and EU-level regulatory change. No financial terms for the move were disclosed. The transfer reflects continued competition among elite US firms with London offices to build out their regulatory capabilities, particularly in areas where the post-Brexit divergence between UK and EU frameworks is creating complex dual-compliance advisory demand for asset managers and financial institutions.
International · Tue, 14 Jul 2026
**Freshfields** is reported to be rebuilding its Singapore corporate team through a lateral hire from **Permira**, the private equity firm. The hire signals a deliberate effort to strengthen the firm's position in ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) deal-making after what the source describes as a period of team rebuilding. The move is part of a broader competitive dynamic in which **Magic Circle** and elite US firms are competing intensely for lateral talent in Asia Pacific, particularly in Singapore, which has re-emerged as a principal hub for regional private equity and cross-border M&A. The source also notes that the **India-UK trade deal**, which takes effect from **15 July 2026**, will reduce import duties on UK-built passenger vehicles from 110% to 30% in year one, with a further reduction to 10% by year five under a **Tariff Rate Quota** mechanism. That deal gives duty-free access for 99% of Indian goods exported to the UK, with India reducing tariffs on 90% of UK exports in phases. **Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles**, which owns **Jaguar Land Rover**, is identified as a potential beneficiary of the automotive tariff reduction. The trade deal's entry into force creates new transactional and advisory work across customs, trade, and corporate practices.
International · Sun, 5 Jul 2026
**Clifford Chance**, **Slaughter and May**, **Linklaters**, and **Freshfields** occupied the top four positions in the UK M&A adviser rankings for the first half of 2026, reversing recent years in which US-headquartered firms had been gaining market share, according to Law.com data. UK deal value climbed **111% year-on-year** to **$332.4 billion**, driven by several large-cap transactions and a rebound in cross-border activity. The surge in UK deal value reflects a confluence of factors: the depreciation of sterling relative to the dollar making UK assets attractive to overseas buyers, the resolution of a degree of post-Brexit regulatory uncertainty, and a broader global M&A recovery as interest rate conditions stabilise. UK domestic firms reclaiming the top advisory positions suggests that client relationships and deep knowledge of English law documentation — rather than US platform breadth alone — remain the decisive competitive advantage for the largest UK-nexus transactions. **Kirkland & Ellis** also featured in the rankings. The data covers the period January to June 2026 and ranks advisers by deal value on completed and announced transactions with a UK nexus. No financial or league table methodology details beyond those stated have been extracted from the available source material, which sits behind a subscriber paywall.
Capital Markets · Fri, 3 Jul 2026
**Clifford Chance**, **Slaughter and May**, **Linklaters**, and **Freshfields** led the UK M&A legal adviser rankings for the first half of 2026, reclaiming the top four positions from US-headquartered rivals and bucking a trend of recent years in which American firms had steadily captured market share. UK deal value climbed **111% year-on-year** to **$332.4 billion**, driven by several large-cap transactions and a rebound in cross-border activity. The data, reported in the context of **London Stock Exchange Group** figures and broader global deal-flow analysis, sits alongside a separate dataset showing worldwide M&A volumes rising approximately 50% in H1 2026, with mega-deals (transactions above a certain large-cap threshold) doubling. At the global level, **Kirkland & Ellis** and **Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz** topped the rankings by total principal deal value. The UK domestic resurgence reflects the scale of inbound cross-border activity targeting British assets — a trend noted by market participants throughout H1 — as well as the ability of Magic Circle firms to defend mandates on the largest domestic and multi-jurisdictional transactions. The 111% year-on-year jump in UK deal value is a striking headline figure, though it partly reflects depressed baseline comparators from H1 2025. The pipeline of large-cap UK corporate transactions continues to be a primary revenue driver for City firms, and the rankings data confirms that domestic advisory relationships remain competitive with US firm penetration at the top of the market.
International · Sat, 20 Jun 2026
**Freshfields** has hired a top partner from **Hengeler Mueller**, the elite German independent law firm, in what Law360 describes as a rare lateral hire. The move is significant because Hengeler Mueller — one of Germany's most prestigious and historically insular independent partnerships — very rarely loses senior partners to international firms. The lateral hire market in London and across European capitals has remained highly competitive in 2026, with US firms and the larger international partnerships continuing to target senior partners from established independent European practices. The source describes the London lateral hiring market as volatile, with **Kirkland & Ellis** and **Paul Hastings** frequently at the centre of the action. The Freshfields hire from Hengeler Mueller signals the Magic Circle firm's continued appetite to deepen its German corporate practice at a senior level — Hengeler Mueller is a go-to adviser for major German corporates and financial institutions on domestic and cross-border M&A, and its partners carry deep client relationships. The precise practice area of the partner being recruited was not confirmed in the available source.
International · Thu, 4 Jun 2026
**White & Case** has hired corporate mergers and acquisitions partners **Noah Carr** and **Gordon Palmquist** from **Freshfields** in Tokyo, bolstering its cross-border M&A practice in Japan at a moment when dealmaking in the market has reached unprecedented levels. The lateral move intensifies an already fierce competition among international law firms for senior transactional talent in Tokyo, where a limited pool of qualified cross-border M&A lawyers is being competed over by an expanding roster of US and UK firms. Japan has emerged as one of the most active M&A markets globally, driven by a combination of corporate governance reform pressure (pushing listed Japanese companies to unlock holding structures and improve returns on equity), yen weakness making Japanese assets attractive to foreign acquirers, and domestic conglomerate restructuring. These structural dynamics have made Tokyo one of the highest-priority growth markets for international law firms with transactional ambitions in Asia. The hire is the latest in a series of high-profile lateral moves in the Tokyo market, as firms including **Kirkland & Ellis** and **Paul Hastings** have also been active in the London and international lateral market. For Freshfields, the loss of two M&A partners in a single office represents a tangible competitive setback in a market it has long sought to lead.
AI & Law · Tue, 2 Jun 2026
**OpenAI** has formally entered the legal market, hiring **Jason Boehmig**, founder of contract lifecycle management (CLM) company **Ironclad**, to lead its push into the legal vertical — a move first reported by **Artificial Lawyer** on 18 May 2026 and confirmed as operational as of 2 June. OpenAI now joins **Anthropic** and **Microsoft** as the three major AI platform companies actively targeting the legal sector with dedicated product and sales strategies. The entry of foundation model providers (companies that build the large AI models underlying most commercial AI tools) directly into legal represents a structural threat to the existing legal technology ecosystem. Artificial Lawyer's analysis identifies three potential scenarios: one where Big Tech effectively displaces incumbent legal tech vendors, particularly CLM companies and productivity-focused SaaS (software-as-a-service) products; one where a more measured competitive equilibrium emerges with law firms diversifying across providers; and one where Microsoft's deep entrenchment as the platform where legal work happens gives it a structural advantage if it improves its Legal Agent product. The immediate commercial impact is being felt in legal tech M&A: multiple sources told Artificial Lawyer that a significant number of legal technology companies — including major names — are actively exploring sales processes as the OpenAI entry shifts the competitive landscape. The article notes that **Freshfields** is among firms working with Claude (Anthropic's model), while OpenAI is expected to make its largest in-house legal team impact rather than at Big Law firms initially.
AI & Law · Mon, 18 May 2026
**OpenAI** is planning to launch a dedicated legal AI product, provisionally branded **'Codex for Legal'**, according to sources speaking to industry publication *Artificial Lawyer*. The offering would sit within a broader family of vertical enterprise tools under the Codex platform — OpenAI's facility originally built for software engineers, now being extended across major business sectors including finance and legal. The plan involves recruiting from the legal technology sector: an executive from a well-known contracts-focused legal tech company has already been approached, with additional senior hires under active consideration. The move directly parallels **Anthropic**'s earlier expansion of **Claude for Legal** — which now encompasses 12 plugins and a growing range of MCP (multi-channel protocol, a standard that allows AI tools to connect to third-party software) connectors — and **Microsoft**'s Legal Agent product. All three Big Tech operators are competing to embed their AI tools at the centre of lawyers' daily workflow, whether through word processors, document management systems, or standalone platforms. **Freshfields** and other major firms have adopted Anthropic's Claude for Legal. OpenAI's entry is being pursued alongside the rollout of its 'OpenAI Deployment Company' — a team of forward-deployed engineers sent into enterprise clients to help them integrate AI at scale. **Greg Brockman**, OpenAI's co-founder, has announced plans to integrate ChatGPT and Codex into a single system as part of the company's focus on agentic AI (AI that can take sequences of actions autonomously, rather than simply responding to individual prompts).