Weil Gotshal, Overtaken by NY Big-Law Peers, Races to Catch Up

For years, Weil Gotshal & Manges sat atop two of the most important businesses for Big Law firms: closing private-equity deals and shepherding giant bankruptcies.

With partners synonymous with the earliest days of those practices, and in an industry that often rewards tradition, Weil once appeared locked into the top echelon of law firms.

That assumption is now being tested.

Weil grew its revenue at half the annualized rate of its competitors from 2008 to 2025, according to data from American Lawyer and Citi’s law firm banking group. The gap widened last year, when Weil’s revenue rose less than 3% while the 50 largest firms soared more than 13%, according to Wells Fargo. Peers like Davis Polk, Simpson Thacher and Paul Weiss zoomed past Weil on key metrics.

With its surging Wall Street competitors writing huge checks to lure top lawyers, Weil faces an increasingly urgent question: Can it catch up?

That task will fall to Ramona Nee, a Boston-based private-equity partner tapped this year to lead the firm. She will take over as executive partner at the end of the year from Barry Wolf, who has held the chief executive-like role since 2010 and is only the second executive partner in the firm’s history. Wolf will retire from chair of the firm’s management committee at the end of next year at the latest, and Nee will succeed him. She will be in a leadership role alongside influential partner Mike Aiello, who leads the firm’s corporate department and last year was named chair of a new strategy committee.

Weil spent last year accelerating lateral hiring, adding 39 partners—the most in its history. It has focused on high-growth areas such as sports and secondaries transactions and launched a liability management practice, seeking to capture more of the latest wave of restructuring work that’s now a vital complement for a thriving Chapter 11 practice.

There are early signs of a rebound. Billings are up 27% while revenue and net income are up 19% through the first four months of 2026 compared with the year-ago period, Wolf said. The firm has hired 16 lateral partners so far this year.

But in roughly a dozen interviews with people familiar with the firm—including former partners, lawyers who compete with Weil, and recruiters—there’s plenty of skepticism that the firm can quickly gain ground. Weil has struggled to hire rainmakers, missed out on growth in vital areas, and generally been inward-looking and proud as competitors grew stronger and picked off its partners, said the people, who were granted anonymity to protect relationships.

Weil’s earliest struggles can be traced to a 2013 decision, one of Wolf’s first as firm leader, to lay off lawyers and cut partner pay to prepare for what he saw as a new slow-growth reality for Big Law coming out of the previous decade’s financial crisis, when Weil handled two of the biggest finance bankruptcies ever—Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual. The assumptions proved wrong when law firms began growing again, and Weil has been trying to regain its footing since.

Firms including Paul Weiss, Simpson Thacher and Davis Polk have made serious strategic changes in the past decade—diving headlong into the private equity business, investing in new cities, or stretching partner pay to attract and retain stars. New leadership has driven those imperatives at those firms and others, such as Gibson Dunn, Paul Hastings and Sidley Austin.

“Those [firms] who embrace change—who select the right leaders, challenge legacy assumptions, and commit to ambitious transformation—will position their firms to succeed in the next era,” a report from law firm consultancy Fairfax Associates last month said. “Those who do not may find that the window for action closes faster than expected.”

Wolf acknowledged the firm had been “a little too conservative” in lateral hiring in recent years, though he said Weil is trying to expand without abandoning its culture and collaborative style. He said the firm offers something different than behemoths like Kirkland & Ellis or Latham & Watkins, whose scale and checkbooks can unsettle any rival partnership.

“There is room for firms of our size, providing something different to successfully compete in this environment,” he said.

Nee hinted at a new direction under her leadership, saying her and Wolf are “different people” and she will bring her own personality and leadership style to the position. The goal is to hire lawyers who are “accretive to the platform at large” and will help institutionalize client relationships across the firm, she said.

Six years ago, Weil ranked No. 6 among law firms advising on global private-equity deals, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Last year, it fell out of the top 20.

“We are navigating an incredibly dynamic business environment, and it is one we will continue to respond to in a nimble matter,” Nee said. “We do not tolerate mediocrity.”

Proud History

When Weil hit $1 billion in revenue in 2005, only six other firms had crossed that mark. Its $2 billion in revenue last year made it the 29th largest law firm, according to American Lawyer data.

It’s widely credited as the first large law firm to adopt a Chapter 11 bankruptcy practice, built by the pioneering and brash Harvey Miller. Weil was an early mover representing private equity firms, too. Texas-based partner Glenn West was doing leveraged buyouts in the early 1990s, before the term “private equity” had even been coined.

A Queens native, Wolf joined the firm in 1984 after graduating from University of Michigan Law School. He started as a tax lawyer but was later asked to help start the private equity practice.

He rose to co-chair the corporate department in 2005, and took the firm’s reins when law firms were rocked by the financial crisis. Weil was then roughly a year into the Chapter 11 case for Lehman Brothers, which generated nearly a tenth of the firm’s revenue from 2009 through 2011. The restructuring work bolstered the firm during a downturn for its peers, making Weil one of only four major law firms that grew its profits per equity partner in 2008.

At the time, Wolf told Bloomberg that the firm’s bankruptcy practice “won’t always be as booming as it is now.” He couldn’t have been more right, but it would have been hard to grasp exactly what that would mean for his firm.

Weil stumbled when the bankruptcy work dried up. Its deals work recovered slowly, and its New York lawyers had time on their hands. Wolf and his team didn’t think this was temporary; instead, they saw Big Law entering a new slow-growth reality. “We believe that this not just a cycle but that the supply-demand balance is out of whack across the industry,” Wolf told the New York Times.

It fired 60 lawyers and slashed compensation for many of its partners, encouraging them to find work elsewhere. The firm targeted its commercial litigation practices in Boston and Houston—two cities that would later become important growth markets for the world’s largest firms.

People who weren’t targeted by the cuts began to leave. In the most prominent example, just months after Weil’s layoffs, eight partners in Dallas defected to Sidley Austin. In total, more than 30 lawyers left the firm’s Texas offices. It was a significant hit for Weil’s then-115 lawyer operation in the Lone Star State, which a local industry publication described at the time as “the paradigm of Big Law in Texas.”

Six months after Weil’s Texas departures, Kirkland & Ellis launched a Houston office that quickly got work on a string of oil and gas bankruptcies—the result of a drawn-out shakeout in the state’s shale fields. Haynes Boone, a Texas law firm, began tracking the oil patch bankruptcies in 2015, noting that it expected to see trouble in the industry. When the firm stopped the tracking in 2022, it said, “We never expected to see so many bankruptcies for so long.”

Kirkland’s dominant market share representing bankrupt energy companies was key in its rise to dethrone Weil as the busiest debtor-side bankruptcy firm.

Today, Weil’s Houston and Dallas offices have about 60 lawyers combined, according to data from SurePoint Legal Insights. Kirkland has nearly 470 lawyers in the state.

Wolf still defends the layoffs as a prudent response to the end of the Lehman work. He disputes that the post-crisis period was one of broad-based demand growth. Instead, he said, some rivals expanded by “acquiring market share, by acquiring people.”

‘My Closest Friend’

A 2001 Boston University Law School graduate, Nee joined Weil as an associate in 2002 with private equity star Jim Westra, who departed what was then Boston’s oldest law firm, Hutchins Wheeler, as it completed a merger with Nixon Peabody.

An original member of the Boston office, Nee developed a significant private equity practice, including through a close relationship with Advent International, where Westra, who’s now retired, became chief legal officer in 2011. Nee advised Advent on at least five deals last year, and this year has closed deals on behalf of Bain Capital and Providence Equity Partners.

Her selection as the next leader has made some former Weil partners more optimistic about its future.

“She’s certainly more than capable of playing that role,” said one person who has worked directly with Nee. “She’s super impressive.”

Still, Nee has witnessed notable departures from Weil’s private equity practice during her career.

Around 2016, Weil lost a handful of private equity partners who’ve gone on to prominent positions at competitor firms. Michael Weisser is now a Kirkland executive committee member. Sarah Stasny runs private equity transactions at Proskauer. David Blittner is head of Ropes & Gray’s corporate practice.

The firm’s long-time reluctance to hire lateral partners hurt its ability to grow with private equity clients as they went through important changes, said a former Weil partner and two partners at competing firms that have hired Weil partners.

For instance, the largest asset managers have built insurance businesses; launched strategies for investing in other private funds, known broadly as secondaries transactions; and most recently have been powering the investments in AI data centers. Competition has been fierce for experts in those niche fields, which are seen as vital to providing a full-service model to the largest asset management clients.

More broadly, former partners said Aiello, the chair of the firm’s 600-lawyer corporate department, blocked opportunities for younger lawyers to develop into leadership positions and treated private equity as less important than public-company M&A deals.

Aiello, one of the country’s top M&A lawyers, generates business and wields decision-making authority to a degree that multiple sources described him as the firm’s most powerful person. He led the task force formed to select Wolf’s successor, for instance.

A Weil spokesman said the firm’s US private equity group has doubled in size under Aiello’s leadership—growing from 80 lawyers to 160—and noted he had promoted or recruited many of the lawyers now leading its private equity practices. Aiello declined to comment.

Wolf said critiques of Aiello’s leadership are unfounded. He hasn’t sapped the private equity group’s autonomy or flexibility, Wolf said, noting that the firm’s top leadership committees are littered with private equity lawyers.

“Mike is my closest friend in the firm,” Wolf said. “He is spending 95% of his time practicing with clients.”

Nee said Weil has been “laser-focused” on adapting as sponsor clients expanded beyond traditional buyouts.

Since the start of 2025, the firm hired 15 private equity and private funds partners and promoted eight partners in those groups.

“Did we grow it as fast as we might have? Probably not,” Wolf said, “but we are accelerating that now.”

‘Should Have Promoted It Better’

Weil was at the center of an out-of-court workout in 2016 involving retailer J. Crew that heralded a new era for the restructuring bar. The deal transferred J. Crew’s intellectual property into a new entity, allowing the company to raise more debt at the expense of former creditors. The firm later represented the retailer in a Chapter 11 filing.

The maneuver went on to be known as the first of a new wave of deals dubbed liability management exercises, used predominantly by private equity sponsors looking to extend the runway for struggling portfolio companies.

Wolf said that Weil “invented” the liability management maneuver, lawyerly referred to as “technology.” Still, for company-side representations, it was best commercialized by Kirkland & Ellis, which Wolf acknowledges. “We should have promoted it better,” he said. “And we didn’t.”

The Weil partner who led on the J. Crew work, Ray Schrock, left in 2024 for Latham & Watkins, bringing two partners along with him. Schrock was a management committee member at Weil and also led its bankruptcy practice. He was one of three practice group leaders to depart within the span of a week.

More leaders left in early 2025, including former management committee member Jonathan Polkes, who now co-leads litigation at White & Case, and Jeffrey Osterman, who is chair of life sciences licensing and collaboration transactions at Paul Weiss.

Wolf referred to those exits as “disruptions” and blamed them for the firm’s poor financial performance in 2025.

He said the firm’s assignment guiding troubled auto parts manufacturer First Brands through Chapter 11 was evidence that the bankruptcy group is still seen as doing top-quality matters.

“Look who was hired for the most complicated restructuring matter,” Wolf said. “People went out into the market and hired, in my view, the best.”

A Family Business

Lawyers who have worked with Wolf describe him as personable and easy to engage—the type of leader known for getting on the floor to play with colleagues’ young children in the office.

He launched a podcast last year after being advised the firm needed a social media presence. The podcast, titled “Leaders,” features a lightning-round of the same questions: Why did you become a lawyer? (For Wolf, it was a bit of an accident.) What’s your favorite snack? (Wolf likes ice cream.) What actor would play you in a biopic? (“I’d have to say George Clooney, why not?”)

“One of the things we are selling here is the camaraderie,” Wolf said. “These are real people with real lives. And we get along.”

Nee said the podcast was part of a larger strategy to find more ways to tell the firm’s story.

“We’ve maybe taken too much of a humble approach,” she said.

In one podcast episode, Wolf tells a partner that he views Weil “as a family.”

John Morley, a Yale Law professor who has written about law firm management, said it’s rational for Weil’s leader to want the firm to be bound together by something more than money.

“What everyone wonders is: Do they actually mean that, or is this just a post hoc rationalization for their failure to aggressively pursue market opportunities?” Morley said. “Without being inside the firm, it’s impossible to know.”

Weil rejiggered its compensation system in 2024. Wolf said the firm now has the financial ability to match the industry’s highest salaries, which can exceed $25 million a year. The fact it rehired 20 former partners since the beginning of 2023 is evidence of Weil’s appeal, he said.

Nee has an opportunity to reset the firm’s trajectory by making a direct appeal to the firm’s top clients, said Bruce MacEwen, a law firm consultant at Adam Smith, Esq. The message: There’s a new direction under a new leader, and we want an opportunity to prove that our lawyers provide the best advice and service.

“Barring a real conscious effort to recognize that their reputation and financial performance has slipped, it is going to keep slipping,” MacEwen said. “And there’s no entitlement to perpetual life.”