Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Latham & Watkins is set to poach a star dealmaker from Wachtell Lipton as the Los Angeles-founded law firm, one of the world’s largest by revenue, seeks to build a corporate practice that can compete with its New York-based rivals.
The Wachtell lawyer, Zach Podolsky, is ranked as the mergers and acquisitions attorney who advised on the highest dollar value of deals nationwide between 2020 and 2024, overseeing nearly $210bn of deals, according to industry tracker Deal Point Data.
Podolsky’s departure is likely to be announced in the coming days, three people said. Podolsky, who joined Wachtell in 2011 and became a partner in 2020, recently advised Pfizer on its $43bn buyout of cancer drugmaker Seagen, Hess on its $60bn sale to rival Chevron and ConocoPhillips on its $22.5bn takeover of Marathon Oil.
Wachtell, Latham and Podolsky did not immediately respond to multiple requests for comment.
Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, with only a few hundred lawyers and a single office in New York, is considered one of the top corporate law firms in the US and rarely loses partners to rivals. But amid a frenzy of poaching in recent years, with top talent commanding pay packages in excess of $20mn, even the elite Wachtell has faced occasional defections.
Wachtell is one of the few Wall Street law firms that maintains a “lockstep” pay model that compensates lawyers based on tenure, though its bonuses far exceed even its best competitors and rival those of investment banks.
Latham this year hired John Sobolewski, a corporate finance and restructuring specialist, from Wachtell, a move that received wide attention across Wall Street. The hiring of Podolski is an attempt by Latham to fill the gap left by Justin Hamill, one of the firm’s previous star corporate M&A partners who left this year for private equity firm Silver Lake.
Latham boasts 3,500 lawyers around the world and has top practices across various dealmaking areas. It is widely considered to be trying to become the chief rival to Kirkland & Ellis as a megafirm that can be a one-stop shop for Fortune 500 companies and private capital firms.
Latham has also been among the most aggressive firms in London in acquiring talent from the Magic Circle firms.