Wake Up Call: Southwest Promotes Novota As Next General Counsel

Welcome to Bloomberg Law’s Wake Up Call, a daily rundown of the top news for lawyers, law firms, and in-house counsel.

• Southwest Airlines Co.'s new general counsel, Jeff Novota, is taking the job after a stint as the budget airline’s vice president for legal—corporate and transactions. Novota succeeds chief legal officer Mark Shaw, who is moving into an executive advisor role with the company. (Global Legal Post)
• Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer has boosted its pay for London-based “NQ” or newly qualified lawyers from 125,000 to 150,000 pounds. The bump “reflects our confidence in the firm’s continued market leadership across all our London practices,” said Freshfields London managing partner Mark Sansom. (Financial News)
• The legal profession needs generative AI that has “a solid foundation of accurate and up-to-date information,” with widely agreed definitions, to allow the tech to produce “reliable outputs.” One possible panacea is Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry, a group that has developed a common data standard for defining and “tagging” contracts, patents, and other legal data. (Financial Times)

Laterals, Moves, In-house

• Maria-Leticia Ossa Daza has joined Paul Weiss as head of the firm’s new Latin America practice group, resident in the New York office.