Debevoise & Plimpton Deals Prowess Tested by Leadership Exits

Debevoise & Plimpton’s approach of building talent from within is being tested with leadership departures after the firm topped most rivals in guiding first-quarter deals.

The New York-founded firm has shown the ability to consistently ride the top end of the M&A leaderboard while shunning the approach of large rivals, who have been poaching top talent from other firms and overhauling compensation structures so they can pay top dollar. Instead, the 94-year-old Debevoise has stuck with the industry’s old-fashioned approach of looking for leaders from within and a lockstep compensation system of paying its people based on seniority.

“We stay focused on developing our young talent,” said Christopher Anthony, the new co-chair of the firm’s M&A group, in an interview. “We’re not out there paying people $20 million—it’s just not in our system.”

Debevoise ranked third by the value of mergers and acquisitions it guided as primary legal adviser in the first quarter, behind Kirkland & Ellis and Davis Polk & Wardwell, according to Bloomberg data. The firm’s fast start in 2025 came after it ranked 14th by deals value for all of last year.

Read more: For a list of the Top 20 firms and an interactive graphic with the deals they won, click here for Bloomberg Law’s mergers and acquisitions league tables

Anthony is a prime example of the firm’s approach. He joined Debevoise after graduating from Columbia Law School in 2009 and was promoted to M&A co-chair in March after Michael Diz exited for Davis Polk & Wardwell.

Diz was a key cog in Debevoise’s success. He steered the team that advised Verizon Communications Inc. in a $20 billion acquisition of Frontier Communications Parent Inc. announced last September.

Hitting Exits

Diz wasn’t the firm’s only recent departure. Also in March, Jennifer Chu, deputy co-chair of the M&A group, joined TPG Inc. as a partner, chief legal officer and general counsel. On Monday, Kirkland announced it had hired away Andrew Gershon, who aids investors and sponsor-side clients with secondary transactions.

Still, the firm contends that its promote-from-within strategy and purely lockstep seniority-based compensation structure have kept exits from the firm infrequent over time. Debevoise has seen eight partner departures over the past year, according to data from Leopard Solutions.

Along with Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, it’s the last Big Law firm known to stick with the lockstep model rather than selectively raising levels so it can pay recruited superstars. Debevoise leaders argue that the model encourages lawyers to focus on the quality of the workplace instead of solely on pay.

An active lateral market creates “disruption and lack of stability” for clients, said Kevin Rinker, a 25-year Debevoise veteran who co-chairs M&A with Anthony. “It’s almost certainly been easier to retain people in our system, just looking at lack of lateral movement relative to really all of our competitors,” he said.

Chu’s departure to TPG could be a benefit to the firm, according to Rinker. “With a fan of the firm in the GC role, that certainly isn’t going to hurt our future prospects,” he said.

Creative Dealmaking

The firm guided 18 deals worth $78.9 billion in the first quarter. Its work on two mega deals pushed up its rank.

Debevoise in March guided Stefano Pessina, the chairman and largest shareholder of Walgreens Boots Alliance, in the retailer’s sale to Sycamore Partners in a transaction valued at up to $23.7 billion. In January, the firm steered Access Industries, a Calpine Corp. shareholder, in connection with Calpine’s $26.6 billion sale to Constellation Energy Corp.

The firm’s success relative to most peers came during what was a slow first quarter transactions market because of an evolving trade war, geopolitical skirmishes and swinging public company valuations. While global deal volume ticked up by 7% in the first quarter compared to the same period last year, according to Bloomberg data, the results fell short of the boom dealmakers hoped for with the start of President Donald Trump’s second term.

“There’s no doubt that some of the macro conditions that we’re facing right now are creating uncertainty, which is the death knell for M&A,” Rinker said. “It’s very hard to value businesses in uncertain times.”

Debevoise lawyers have had to come up with creative ways to keep deals flowing.

“I had a deal a couple months ago, where we came up with a mechanism to compensate the buyer for any adverse impact of tariffs,” Rinker said. “That’s one way to deal with it, through some sort of protection provided by the seller for some period of time.”

Another approach firm lawyers have taken is to straddle private equity and strategic work as a unified specialization rather than separate work. That gives them more insight on how both their client and other parties in a deal think, Anthony said.

“Something we’ve focused on for a long time is having both those capabilities—often within the same lawyer,” he said.