Weil Gotshal Didn't Die of Greed. It Died When It Lost Momentum.

The internet has decided Weil's collapse was a story about culture. The public record points somewhere less comfortable, and far more useful to anyone choosing a law firm this year. 

I have spent over fifteen years moving lawyers between firms, and for most of that time my work has been with the people running them rather than the ones leaving. I have watched practice groups walk out of buildings, watched managing partners do the arithmetic on the back of an envelope, and watched candidates pick the wrong firm for the right reasons. What has happened to Weil, Gotshal & Manges over the past five weeks is the clearest lesson in law firm economics I have seen in my career, and most of the commentary is drawing the wrong conclusion from it.

1. The Recent Story So Far

Weil's management committee told partners on Wednesday 28 October 2026 that the firm should pursue an orderly wind-down. The partnership then voted to execute an orderly global wind-down. Associates and staff were promised 90 days of salary and benefits, with bonuses at year end (Reuters). Ironically, the firm that represented the debtors in some of the largest bankruptcies in American history, including Enron, General Motors and Lehman Brothers, will run its own wind-down outside bankruptcy, advised by Davis Polk and AlixPartners.

The proximate cause is not mysterious. More than 30 partners left this year, including members of the firm's executive committee (Reuters), and Legal Business counts nearly 60 who have gone or announced they are going since January 2026. In September, Michael Aiello, chair of the 600-lawyer corporate practice and the firm's biggest rainmaker, left for Cravath with five other transactional partners. London followed: the office co-managing partner, David Avery-Gee, to Sullivan & Cromwell, the London finance head Tom Richards to Simpson Thacher, and the private equity M&A partner Max Oppenheimer to Paul Weiss, which also took the private equity co-head Christopher Machera in New York. Merger talks with Willkie Farr & Gallagher, which would have created a firm with about US$4 billion of combined revenue, ended days before the wind-down.

Days before the recommendation, Ramona Nee, who had been lined up to succeed Barry Wolf as executive partner in January, made clear she would not take the job. And with the information available to her as part of the inner circle, who could blame her. The New York Times reported she had told management in August. Many partners only found out that week.

Then came the run, and the speed of it startled the profession.

Weil had almost no debt.

It earned US$2.078 billion in 2025, ranked 29th in the Am Law 100, and paid its equity partners US$5.593 million on average, 20th in the country. One partner told American legal commentator David Lat the firm was on pace for more than $6 million PEP this year. Firms do not die of $6 million profits per partner. They die of what $6 million signals when the firm down the street is paying US$11 million and grew its PEP 20% last year.

The collapse looked sudden. The causes were not.

2. The Decision That Set the Clock Running

If you want the root of this, we have to go back to June 2013.

Weil came through the financial crisis without mass layoffs because its bankruptcy practice was the busiest in the world. Then that work wound down. In June 2013 the firm cut 60 lawyers and 110 staff, having already cut the pay of 30 of its roughly 300 partners (New York Times DealBook; ABA Journal). Barry Wolf, then chairman, was blunt: there was not enough work for all the lawyers. By the autumn, eight Dallas partners, including management committee member Yvette Ostolaza, had left for Sidley Austin. David Lat covered the period so closely that his Above the Law series was called "As the Weil Turns".

The Wall Street Journal's account of this year's crisis also suggests the roots go back more than a decade: the firm made money in the crisis and did not reinvest it, cut lawyers while competitors were hiring, fell behind on headcount, revenue and profit, and became easy to poach from.

That is a story about a firm that answered a profitability problem by protecting profitability. The strategy, with hindsight, was clear: cut the cost base, protect the distribution, keep the equity pool tight.

And here is the part that the greed narrative cannot accommodate. Those decisions were rational. If the work had genuinely gone, cutting the people who did it was the responsible thing to do, and paying the partners who stayed was not a sin. Weil had almost no debt, no crisis of solvency and no need for rescue. It survived. A year later, the 2014 Vault 100 still ranked it sixth in the country for prestige, and its PEP was still climbing in absolute terms.
That is what makes it interesting. Rational decisions are often the revealing ones. What the cuts signalled was not that Weil was in trouble. It was how Weil intended to compete: by protecting the economics of the people at the top rather than reinvesting more aggressively in future growth.

None of that was visible in 2014. It was visible in 2026.

Absolute numbers hide relative decline. Partners do not compare their pay to last year. They compare it to what a friend at Kirkland or Gibson Dunn made, and to what a recruiter told them they could earn next month.

The important question is not whether those decisions worked. They plainly did. The important question is whether they created the conditions for future momentum. Looking back, 2013 appears less significant because of the cuts themselves than because of what they signalled about how the firm intended to compete.

3. Profitability Is Not Momentum

Most of the commentary assumes Weil collapsed because its profitability deteriorated.

It did not. Weil was one of the richest law firms in the industry right up to the week it died. Revenue of US$2.078 billion, 29th in the country. Profits per equity partner of US$5.593 million, ranked 20th in the US. Almost no debt and a clean balance sheet. Firms do not go out of business on numbers like that.

So the story cannot be that Weil stopped making money, because Weil did not stop making money. Something else stopped.

Look at how the firm grew after 2020. Total headcount up 5.7%. Equity partners up 1.7%. Non-equity partners up 45.8% (Law.com Compass data, reported by Law.com International). In plain terms: the firm added lawyers and stretched the promise of equity while barely admitting anyone into the economics. That is not a culture. It is a hiring strategy with a culture attached.

Now the growth rate. In 2025 Weil increased PEP by 4.13%, which would be a healthy result in most industries. Over the same year, average PEP across the Am Law 100 rose 14.0%, aggregate revenue rose 13.0%, and 70 of the 100 firms posted PEP growth of at least 10% (The American Lawyer). Kirkland grew PEP 20.19% to $11.121 million. Wachtell grew 34.48% to $12.152 million. Weil's revenue grew by less than 3% while the 50 largest firms in the country grew by more than 13%.

Meanwhile its position in the table moved from 9th on PEP in 2019, at $4.028 million, to 20th in 2025. You do not lose a firm in a year on numbers like that. You lose it after thirteen years of them, with other firms outpacing that growth.

Here is the distinction the coverage keeps missing, and it is the one that matters.

Profitability measures how valuable a platform is today. Momentum measures how valuable talented people believe it will be tomorrow.

Those are different things, they are measured differently, and they can move in opposite directions for years. A firm can be extremely profitable and visibly running out of future. It can also be modestly profitable and obviously going somewhere. Every lawyer I have ever moved has been making that second judgement, usually without the vocabulary for it, and usually correctly.

Weil in 2026 was the first kind of firm. The evidence was not hidden in a balance sheet. It was in the ranking column, the equity ratio, the departures, and above all in the succession.

4. Why Culture Could Not Save It

Here is where I part company with the comment threads. Everyone has spent a week saying Weil's culture rotted.

Some of the reporting supports that. Law.com spoke to former London partners who said people worked as a team but did not gel, that interests were "more focused on making money than building teams and supporting one another", and that partners kept clients "relatively private" rather than building institutional relationships. Another source said leadership was never the problem.

Now read what Weil's own people have said. You can read it in your own LinkedIn and other social media feed since the news unfolded, where Weil's people have been posting about the firm with real affection. A current lawyer told Lat the firm was "a special place with a really great culture and outstanding people", and that Weil was "the only place I want to work". Jacqueline Haberfeld, a former Weil lawyer who is now global program director of pro bono at Kirkland, wrote about a firm founded by Jewish lawyers who could not get into the Wall Street firms, and about Harvey Miller turning bankruptcy from what was seen as a bottom-feeder practice into the summit of the profession.

Both can be true. That is the part people find hard to hold.

Weil seems to have retained a culture that many lawyers genuinely valued, at the same time as it was losing the people whose departure made that culture commercially irrelevant. Those two facts do not contradict each other. They are the same fact, seen from different observation decks.

The reason is that culture and momentum solve different problems.

Culture encourages people to stay through a difficult year. Momentum persuades them to stay through a difficult decade.

Weil's culture was real, warm and private. It was a culture of individual client ownership, which is excellent for clients and corrosive for an institution, because the institution owned less than it actually needed. Too many relationships belonged to individual partners, and people are portable. When the numbers started to look ordinary next to Paul Weiss and Kirkland, those individuals did what individuals do. They voted with their feet.

So, culture was not the problem. Culture was there, but it was not enough. It did the job it can do, which is to buy a firm time, and then it ran out at exactly the moment Weil needed more.

Culture is not a moat but a discount, and by discount I mean a lawyer accepting less than the market would pay him. A discount needs a market price to be a discount against. That price is set outside the building, by what a peer firm's profits per partner imply a lawyer is worth and by what a competitor will pay him next month. Culture is the reason he accepts less than that number for a while. That is the discount, and culture cannot change the number. Weil's people carried it for a decade, through the 2013 cuts and everything after them, because they believed the firm was still going somewhere. Then the succession broke, and a discount without belief is just a lower salary. It expired in five weeks.

5. What Actually Broke

This is where the story fits together, and where most commentary stops one step short.

Three things happened, in order, and each one made the next one worse.

Economics created concern. The gap between Weil and its peer group was not a secret inside the firm. Partners can read a ranking page and they can read a competitor's PEP. For a decade the gap was survivable because the firm was still, on any absolute measure, one of the best places in the world to be a lawyer. But a senior partner recruiting a junior one has to answer the question "why here?" every single time, and by 2025 the honest answer was getting shorter.

Departures created vulnerability. Once Michael Aiello and his partners left for Cravath, and the London leadership went to Sullivan & Cromwell, Simpson Thacher and Paul Weiss, the firm's remaining partners had new information. Elite partners do not leave because one colleague leaves. They leave when a departure confirms something they already suspected. Each exit made the next exit easier to justify, which is precisely why the run accelerated in the final weeks rather than the final years.

Succession destroyed confidence. This is the paragraph the firm will study for a decade. Weil had a successor. Ramona Nee was elected to take over from Barry Wolf in January, and had told management so in August. Many partners learned this at the end of October, in the same week they learned that the Willkie merger talks had failed. Whatever a partner thought about the economics, and whatever they thought about the departures, that was the moment the question changed from "should I go?" to "who exactly am I staying for?" 

Professor John D. Morley's work at Yale Law School explains why that question is fatal rather than merely difficult. A law firm can be entirely solvent and still collapse, because the assets are people and the liabilities are fixed. Once enough partners withdraw, the arithmetic for those who remain gets worse by the week, and everyone can see it. A partner run is a bank run in better suits. Which means a firm does not need a crisis to die. It needs a reason for the first twenty people to go, and no answer for the next twenty.

That is why I keep coming back to the succession. Economics gave people a reason to think about leaving. The collapse of succession gave them a reason to stop waiting.

The economics started the fire. The succession convinced people not to stay and fight it.

6. Momentum and the Modern Law Firm

So what is momentum, if it is not the same thing as profitability?

It is a credible belief among talented people that the platform will be stronger tomorrow than it is today. As a belief, it cannot be bought directly. And being credible, it cannot be manufactured by a slogan or a strategy away-day.

Momentum should not be confused with expansion. This is the mistake I made for years, and the mistake most of the coverage is making now.
Wachtell has momentum. It has one office, a partnership you could fit in a single room, and a business model that has barely changed in thirty years. Kirkland has momentum. It has roughly six hundred equity partners, offices in every market that matters, and adds revenue at a rate that would embarrass a software company. The best boutiques have momentum. Some of them have twenty lawyers.

A firm can have momentum while growing rapidly, slowly, or hardly at all. What it cannot do is have momentum while its own partners privately believe the best years are behind it. That belief is self-fulfilling in both directions. Partners who believe in the future invest in juniors, hand over clients and stay through a bad year. Partners who do not, do none of those things, and the firm hollows out from the middle in ways that do not show up in the accounts for years.

The Determinants of Momentum

Momentum is produced by a short list of things, none of which is a number on a spreadsheet.

Succession, first and most of all. A firm with an obvious next leader and a clear bench has momentum almost by definition, because everyone can see the future and it has names attached to it. A firm where the succession is contested, delayed or unresolved is telling its partners something they will act on.

Institutional clients, second. A client relationship that belongs to the firm survives the departure of the partner who built it. A relationship that belongs to the partner does not. Weil's culture of individual ownership was excellent for clients and, in the end, fatal for the institution.

Leadership credibility, third. Not likeability. Credibility. Whether partners believe that the people running the firm understand what is happening and are prepared to do difficult things early rather than late.

Reinvestment, fourth. Paul Weiss grew revenue 31.6% in 2024 to US$2.63 billion, having roughly doubled since 2020, because it had spent years buying platforms, practices and people before it needed them. From the outside, investment always looks slightly indiscriminate until it is vindicated.
And promotion into equity, fifth, which is the purest signal a firm sends. A firm that keeps its equity pool closed is telling every senior associate and every junior partner exactly what it thinks about the future. Weil's non-equity tier grew 45.8% while its equity tier grew 1.7%. Nobody inside that firm needed a consultant to explain what it meant.

None of this is soft. All of it is measurable, if you know where to look, which is what partners do in the six months before they leave.

7. On the Trump Deal, and the 200 Who Left

Another misconception worth correcting, because it is spreading.

Some of the commentary has fused Weil's collapse with the 2025 wave of firms cutting deals with the White House. The deal wave was real. Nine firms pledged $940 million in pro bono work to causes the administration supports, Paul Weiss first among them with $40 million after Executive Order 14237, and people resigned over it.

Weil was not one of the nine. No executive order was ever issued against it; the orders went to Covington, Perkins Coie, Paul Weiss, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale and Susman Godfrey. There is no signed Weil agreement to point to.

The "200" is a different number that has been misread. Weil's London office held roughly 200 lawyers before the wind-down, including about 45 partners. Those are the people now looking for work in the City, not defectors over politics.

The political row is a real story about trust in Big Law. It is not this story, and I am not going to bend it into one.

8. If You Practise in Hong Kong, Five Things Follow

Weil's Hong Kong office was not a footnote. The firm closed its Shanghai and Beijing representative offices in 2024, leaving Hong Kong as its only Asia-Pacific presence. On 15 October 2026, thirteen days before the wind-down recommendation, Weil announced it had hired Du Shu from Skadden to launch an Asia capital markets practice in Hong Kong. Two weeks later her new firm told partners it was winding down. She is one of the best-connected capital markets lawyers in the region and she will be fine, but the sequence is the cleanest illustration of the point I keep making to candidates: a firm can be hiring brilliantly and dying quietly at the same time.

So, practically, do the following.

One: underwrite your career against a trajectory, not a brand. Weil was 15th in Vault's prestige rankings this year and it is gone. Ask for equity partner numbers over three years, the non-equity ratio, PEP growth against a named peer group, and who inherited the last three client relationships that mattered.

Two: in Asia, ask which office pays for which. A single-office regional strategy bolted onto a firm retrenching everywhere else is not a strategy. It’s a holding position.

Three: if a firm is recruiting hard while its partners are leaving, ask who is funding the promise. The answer is either a growing platform or a shrinking one. There is no third option.

Four: ask how often partners hand work to each other. This is the test candidates never run, and the one that tells you the most. Does the corporate partner introduce the disputes team without being asked, knowing the fee will land on someone else's numbers this year? Does London send work to Hong Kong, or keep it? One partner candidate described the failure mode to me as partners with "their snout in the trough", each of them protecting their own book.
That is not a question about manners. A partner refers work to a colleague when he expects the platform to be worth more to him in five years than it is today. Reciprocity is momentum made visible on an ordinary Tuesday. Where partners hoard, they are telling you what they believe about the future, and what they believe is that they will not be paid back. Culture can make a firm pleasant to work in. 

Only momentum makes a partner willing to hand over the client.

Five: ask the partners what they believe about the future, and listen to the answer rather than the words. Ask who succeeds the current leader and when. Ask what the firm will look like in five years' time, and which three practices will carry it. Ask a partner who has been there fifteen years what they would tell a friend's adult child to do if faced with the opportunity to join their firm. The ones at a firm with momentum answer immediately and in detail, because they have thought about it and they like the answer. The ones at a firm without it change the subject to the client they just landed. I have watched that hesitation decide more careers than any salary negotiation.

9. The Version of This Story I Do Not Buy

The frenzy wants a morality tale, and morality tales travel further than arithmetic. Three counter-readings deserve an airing.

First, this is not a scandal. It is a run. Morley showed that a firm can collapse with no debt at all once partners start withdrawing, because a partner run is a bank run in better suits. Matt Levine's arithmetic in Bloomberg is worth a double take: lose twenty $50 million partners from a firm with $2 billion of revenue and $600 million of fixed costs, and profit per remaining partner falls from about $5.6 million to about $1.7 million. Nobody in that position waits to see how it ends. If you want a villain, the villain is the structure, not a person.

Second, Weil is a warning, not a bellwether. David Lat made the strongest version of this case, and he was nearly right: firms come back from worse. Boies Schiller was written off in 2020 after a wave of partner exits and is still here under new leadership. O'Melveny survived 2011 after a serious cost-cutting exercise and doubled down on litigation, white collar and regulatory work. Weil itself survived 2013, when the crisis-era bankruptcies of Washington Mutual, General Motors and Lehman Brothers had dried up and the cost base had not. What killed the current version of Weil was not a bad year. It was that when the question was asked, too few people had an answer. Why would a partner on $5.6 million stay for $5.6 million when the market says $11 million, and when nobody can tell you who is in charge next year? Most firms have an answer. Weil's was a story about loyalty, and the story stopped working the week the succession fell apart.

Third, the media framing flatters everyone else. If Weil died of greed, then firms with nicer cultures are safe. They are not. Weil's culture was not worse than the average Am Law 30 firm's. By most accounts it was warmer than most. Weil did not die because it failed to grow, and it did not die because enough people left. Plenty of firms lose partners. Weil died because enough people stopped believing, at the same time, and once that happened the numbers could not hold the place together. Comfortable firms should read this as a warning, not a compliment.

10. The Real Lesson

Candidates ask me about culture constantly. It is almost always the first question, and it is almost always the wrong first question, though I understand why they ask it. Culture is the thing you can feel in an interview. It is the thing former associates talk about. It is legible, and it feels like the answer.
Culture matters. It matters more than most partners think, and it matters for longer than most candidates think. A firm with a genuinely good culture will get more out of its people in a hard year, keep them longer than the money alone would, and produce the kind of loyalty that no retention bonus can buy. If you are choosing between two firms and one of them is full of people you would want to work with at two in the morning, choose that one, all else being equal.

But culture alone is not enough, and Weil is the proof. You do not get to run one of the most profitable firms in the world for ninety-five years, with a culture that partners still describe with affection after it has died, and then have culture described as the thing that went wrong. Culture was there. It was working.

It was the wrong instrument for the problem the firm actually had.

The thing that was missing has a name, and it is not culture. It is momentum.

Momentum is not growth, though growth often accompanies it. It is not headcount, though headcount often follows it. It is not expansion, and it is certainly not a strategy document or a slogan about being one firm. Some of the fastest-growing firms in the world have no momentum at all, because their own partners can see that the growth is being rented rather than built.

Momentum is a credible belief among talented people that the platform will be stronger tomorrow than it is today. It is generated by succession, by institutional client relationships, by leadership that is trusted rather than merely liked, by investment made before it is needed, and by a partnership that keeps admitting people into the future. It is destroyed by the reverse of each of those things, quietly, over years, long before anything appears to be going wrong.

By most accounts, Weil remained full of talented lawyers, loyal clients and colleagues who genuinely enjoyed working together. Those strengths proved to be real. They also proved to be insufficient.

The collapse of Weil is therefore not a lesson about greed, and not primarily a lesson about culture. It is a lesson about momentum.

Momentum should not be confused with growth, headcount or geographic expansion. The best firms in the world take many different forms. What they share is a credible belief among their people that the future will be better than the present.

For more than a decade, Weil appears to have preserved profitability while gradually losing that belief.

In the end, the numbers held up longer than the confidence did.

And confidence, not economics, is usually what decides whether a partnership survives. 

 

 

This article draws on reporting and analysis from Reuters, Bloomberg Law, Financial Times, The New York Times, Law.com, Legal Business, Original Jurisdiction, The American Lawyer and other industry publications, together with publicly available law firm financial data and market commentary. Any views expressed are my own and any errors are mine alone.