The flip nobody quite noticed
London law firm offices hired 48 private equity M&A partners in 2025. New York hired 37. That is a genuine reversal of a ratio that has held for years, and American firms, Kirkland & Ellis chief among them, were the main driver of hiring in both cities, which tells you this is not a London firm renaissance. It is a US firm platform-building exercise that happens to be landing more of its punches in London right now.
Here is the detail that changes what the flip actually means. New York kept its lead over London for funds partners, the lawyers who structure and raise private equity vehicles rather than execute the deals those vehicles do. M&A execution talent is flowing toward London. Fund formation talent is staying in New York. Firms and candidates who treat "private equity lawyer" as one job market are already a step behind the firms making the actual hiring decisions, who have clearly worked out that these are two different markets with two different centres of gravity.
New York is still the deepest market. It just isn't the most competitive one
Scale tells a different story from momentum. Across the last four quarters, roughly 980 corporate lawyers left New York firms and almost as many arrived, more than fifteen times the volume of London's entire lateral partner market in a typical quarter. New York remains, by a wide margin, the largest and most liquid corporate legal market in the world. What London has is not size. It is the sharpest rate of change, concentrated in the specific niche of PE deal execution, and driven by firms willing to pay to acquire it fast rather than build it organically.
It is also worth being precise about where the volume actually sits. The overwhelming majority of the roughly 2,700 corporate lateral moves tracked over the past year involved associates, not partners, and were concentrated among lawyers three to five years qualified. Partner-level moves in the same dataset ran at well under twenty per quarter. The "war for corporate talent" that gets discussed in generic terms is really two different markets stacked on top of each other: a high-volume associate market where firms are absorbing hundreds of mid-level lawyers a quarter, largely from each other, and a much thinner, much higher-stakes partner market where every single hire is a deliberate platform decision rather than a numbers game.
Dubai isn't competing for this talent yet, and that is exactly the point
Dubai is not currently pulling PE M&A execution partners away from London or New York in meaningful numbers, and firms benchmarking DIFC against those two cities on that basis are measuring the wrong thing. What is building in Dubai is fund formation and structuring capacity aimed at GCC-outbound private capital, an adjacent but distinct specialism to either of London's or New York's current battlegrounds. The firms already active there, from White & Case to Curtis to Baker McKenzie, are positioning for where sovereign-adjacent private capital work is heading over the next several years, not competing for this year's deal-execution lateral market. A firm that waits until Dubai shows up in the same hiring league tables as London and New York will have waited until the best structuring relationships in the region are already spoken for.
What this means for decision makers
For firms, the operating question is not "how do we compete for corporate talent" as a single strategy. It is which of at least three distinct markets you are actually competing in: PE deal execution, currently concentrated in London and moving fast; fund formation and structuring, still anchored in New York; and Gulf-facing private capital structuring, which is forming now in Dubai ahead of the volume that will eventually justify it.
Treating a partner-level hire in any of these as a numbers game borrowed from associate-level recruiting is how firms lose the hires that actually matter.
For partners and senior associates, the practical question is which of these three markets your specific specialism sits in, because "corporate" stopped being one career track some time ago. A deal-execution lawyer's leverage right now points toward London. A fund formation specialist's leverage still points toward New York. A lawyer willing to build genuine expertise in Gulf-facing structuring today is positioning for where the market is going, not where it already is.
There is no single corporate talent market left to win. There are at least three, and most firms are still hiring as if there were one.