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Big Law faces a talent shift as AI and strategic hiring reshape the industry. New data from Firm Prospects reveals that nearly 12% of the Big Law class of 2024 has already left their first firm within their first two years of practice, underscoring rising early-career associate mobility. Kirkland & Ellis led the market in both overall hiring and first-year lateral recruiting, while New York and Washington, D.C., remained the top destinations for new associates. The report also found that most Am Law 50 hires did not come from the nation's top-ranked law schools, highlighting evolving recruiting strategies across Big Law and a broader approach to sourcing talent. Market movements. * Kirkland & Ellis launches Dallas restructuring group with two Jones Day partners, Dan Prieto and Amanda Rush * Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP hires ex-Ropes & Gray LLP capital markets partner, Rachel Phillips * White & Case LLP M&A dealmaker, Keith Hallam, jumps to Freshfields in New York * Former Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz co-Chair William Savit, along with five-partner corporate litigation team, moves to Gibson Dunn in major Big Law shakeup Firm spotlight - Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP. Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP is a global law firm with approximately 1,300 attorneys across the U.S. and Europe, recognized for its strong presence in New York and its broad capabilities across nearly 45 practice areas. The firm is a leader in corporate, M&A, private equity, litigation, insurance, antitrust, cybersecurity, and entertainment law, serving clients across a wide range of industries. Founded in 1888, Willkie has built a long-standing reputation for legal excellence while fostering a collaborative culture that emphasizes professional development, strong pro bono work, and a commitment to civic impact. Industry insights. * Among a sample of 55 large law firms, equity partner headcount saw a compound annual growth rate of 0.4% between 2020 and 2025, while non-equity partner headcount rose at a rate of 6.8% annually over the same period, according to Gretta Rusanow at Citi's law firm group. * A majority of Big Law firms surveyed earlier this year are not currently planning to leverage private capital investments, but experts note that a rapidly shifting technology landscape and an ever-widening talent war may cause firms to feel differently about tapping into outside investment as time progresses. The Law.com survey data shows that 63% of Am Law 100 firms who responded to the question have no plans to leverage private capital, a figure that rose to 69% of Am Law 200 firms who responded. Meanwhile, only 2% of Am Law 100 firms said they are actively weighing their options while 3% of Am Law 200 firms stated the same. * About 40% of Am Law 100 firms that responded to a Law.com survey question about billing rates said they would likely go up 10% or more this year, compared to 35.6% who said they went up by that margin last year. (About 46.7% said they'd increase between 7% and 9%, similar to 2025). * Milbank LLP is continuing to lead the way on bonuses, confirming Monday it has issued a round of special bonuses ranging from $6,000 for the class of 2026 and 2025 associates to $25,000 for the class of 2021 associates and beyond. Special counsel will also receive a $25,000 payout, according to a Milbank representative. Kirkland & Ellis Bets Big on AI Infrastructure Growth The rapid expansion of AI infrastructure is fueling demand for real estate expertise in Big Law, with Kirkland & Ellis aggressively hiring partners to support the surge in data center development and financing. The firm has added 12 real estate partners over the past year and recently launched a 600-lawyer "real assets" group that combines real estate, infrastructure, energy, and corporate practices to handle increasingly complex AI-related transactions. As investment in data centers accelerates, firms are expanding cross-disciplinary teams and competing for top real estate talent to capitalize on one of the legal industry's fastest-growing markets. Big Law's New Approach to Lateral Partner Hiring As lateral partner hiring accelerates across Big Law, firms are becoming more strategic about bringing in top talent, especially within already-established practices. Rather than simply chasing large books of business, firms are focusing on "surgical" hires that add new capabilities, strengthen client relationships, and complement existing teams without creating internal conflicts or cultural challenges. Leaders emphasize that the most successful lateral hires are those who enhance the firm's platform while aligning with its existing partners, clients, and long-term growth strategy.

From pilot to daily habit: how enterprise AI adoption is actually scaling in 2026. Enterprises across various sectors like law, banking, and consumer brands are transitioning AI from pilot projects to integrated parts of their workflows. This shift is facilitated by champion networks within organizations, which help embed AI into daily operations. The approach is proving successful as more companies adopt AI on a larger scale. This story was produced through MarketScale. See how Software & Technology teams put it to work with Executive Thought Leadership. By MarketScale Newsroom · July 22, 2026, 4:29 AM PDT · Ai Adoption Enterprise Ai Generative Ai Ai Champions Learn this in 60 seconds Key facts, context, and what it means, in one minute. Key takeaways Companies are integrating AI into daily workflows by leveraging champion networks. AI adoption is becoming more widespread across sectors such as law, banking, and consumer brands. Transitioning from AI pilot projects to operational use is showing measurable success in enterprises. Two years ago, 32 people at law firm Ropes & Gray were sending a few hundred prompts a month to an AI platform called Harvey. Today, nearly 2,200 employees at the same firm generate more than 282,000 prompts a month, and each person is using it roughly three times more than they were a year prior. That figure, reported by the Wall Street Journal, is not an outlier. It is increasingly the benchmark that enterprise operations leaders are being asked to match. The mechanism behind that growth is less about technology procurement and more about organizational design. The Wall Street Journal profiled how Ropes & Gray, Citigroup, and Mars have all engineered similar jumps through internal 'AI champion' networks: regular employees designated as peer advisors who help colleagues connect AI tools to actual recurring work. At Ropes & Gray, Howard Glazer, who co-leads the firm's private equity transactions practice and now also serves as Head of Practice AI, oversees a network of more than 60 such champions across the firm. Where the real numbers are. Citigroup's figures are equally striking. The bank has crossed 80% employee AI tool adoption and logged 42 million AI interactions since its platform launched, according to the Wall Street Journal. More than 10,000 of Citigroup's engineers now use AI tools daily. Those are operational metrics, not pilot KPIs, and they signal that the bank has moved well past the evaluation phase. The broader market context reinforces how fast this window is moving. Forbes Advisor's compiled AI statistics, verified through July 2026, reflect an enterprise landscape where AI tool deployment has accelerated sharply across sectors, with financial services and professional services leading adoption curves. The data suggests the gap between early-scale organizations and those still in experimentation mode is not closing on its own. According to workplace analytics research cited by ai365.blog, peer-supported adoption achieves roughly double the sustained usage of top-down mandates. That finding matters operationally because it reframes the rollout question: the bottleneck is rarely the platform, it is the pathway from license to habit. Workflow prompts, not curiosity prompts. The distinction that separates high-volume adopters from stalled ones comes down to prompt type. As ai365.blog noted in its analysis of the Wall Street Journal's reporting, the prompts that drive measurable productivity gains are not one-off exploratory questions. They are repeatable 'workflow prompts' built around a specific recurring task, a contract review checklist, a client memo template, a daily risk summary, run the same way on a predictable schedule. This reframes how IT and operations leaders should think about AI tool ROI. License utilization rates and seat counts are lagging indicators. The leading indicator is whether employees have identified and codified two or three workflow prompts they run every week. Organizations that get to that point at scale are the ones generating six-figure monthly interaction volumes. Mars, Inc. is among the non-financial-sector examples the Wall Street Journal identified as deliberately building toward this. Consumer goods organizations face a different set of recurring tasks than law firms or banks, but the structural approach, peer champions, shared prompt libraries, task-specific rather than general-purpose guidance, transfers across industries. What this means for your team. * Audit current usage before expanding seats: if existing licensed users are still sending one-off queries rather than repeatable workflow prompts, adding licenses will not move the needle. Identify who is already running structured, recurring prompts and build outward from them. * Designate champions by function, not by seniority or IT proximity. The Wall Street Journal's reporting across Ropes & Gray, Citigroup, and Mars consistently points to peer credibility, a colleague who does the same work, as the trust driver that converts skeptics. * Build and circulate prompt templates for your five highest-frequency team tasks. The Ropes & Gray trajectory from hundreds to 282,000 monthly prompts was enabled by making successful habits copyable, not by requiring each employee to experiment independently. * Set interaction volume and per-user frequency as dashboard metrics alongside seat utilization. Organizations measuring only adoption rates (who has access) miss the operational signal of engagement rates (who is using it daily for real work). Featured companies The MarketScale Newsroom reports on the companies, technologies, and trends shaping 16 B2B industries. 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