News of Winston & Strawn’s merger with Taylor Wessing’s UK arm came in a busy week for transatlantic law firm combinations, with the announcement on 15 December coming just a few days before Hogan Lovells and Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft announced their own $3.6bn deal.
Formal talks between Winston & Strawn and Taylor Wessing UK began earlier this year after a meeting in the first quarter between the Chicago-based firm’s chairman, Stephen D’Amore, and Shane Gleghorn, the UK firm’s managing partner.
“We’ve been focused on the importance of London for some time at Winston & Strawn, particularly since I became chairman 18 months ago,” D’Amore said. “We saw compelling alignments with Taylor Wessing UK around clients and practice areas, and from that moment on it was steady progress.”
Gleghorn noted Taylor Wessing was equally committed to the US market, with a “very significant” amount of the firm’s work generated from US-based clients.
He added that both firms were coming at the merger from a position of financial strength, with the firepower of the combined firm holding the promise of being better able to attract and retain top talent than either firm individually, as well as invest in technology.
The planned merger will create a firm with 1,400 lawyers across 20 offices and with revenue in the region of $1.75bn – a figure that would push Winston Taylor to just outside the top 30 in the Am Law 200, up from Winston & Strawn’s current place at 46.
The deal is set for a vote of both firms’ partnerships at the end of January, and if approved, could provide the combined firm with the momentum to further improve its position in a competitive market in which law firms are wrestling with modest demand growth and ballooning costs. Those pressures, as well as UK firms’ interest in the US, could lead consolidation in the legal market to ratchet up further next year, according to a report published earlier this month by Citigroup and Hildebrandt Consulting.
While not comparable in size and scope to the transatlantic tie-ups that created A&O Shearman in May last year and HSF Kramer this summer, the Winston Taylor merger evidences the pressing need for a credible presence in the vital UK and US markets, said Robert Bata, principal at strategic advisers WarwickPlace Legal.
However, Scott Gibson, director of legal recruitment consultancy Edwards Gibson, struck a cautious note, saying the Winston Taylor merger was “not a super obvious fit”.
“Winston & Strawn is known for litigation and white collar work, while Taylor Wessing is very much a tech and life sciences play so might more naturally have fitted with a West Coast firm, like Perkins Coie,” he said.
Unsurprisingly, D’Amore disagrees with this analysis.
“We have so many common threads that run between our firms,” he said. “Both firms are focused on the markets that drive capital and innovation and we have a lot of common ground in the practices at the top of our list – major litigation, critical transactions, strategic IP and private wealth, which is itself highly complementary in that Shane’s firm brings experience representing family offices and UHNW (ultra high net worth) clients to combine with our focus on private capital.
“We also see a clear strategic alignment in our sectors of focus, namely tech, financial services and life sciences. And in terms of private equity and M&A, the combination will give us a continuous corridor running from the UK and Ireland to our offices in Paris, New York, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles focused on the upper mid-market, and rising. Our colleagues will have a lot of opportunities for cross-selling, cross-marketing and better ways to help our clients win.”
WarwickPlace’s Bata commented: “What we are seeing now is a lot more creative thinking about complementary, non-duplicative practices, and we can expect more focus on technology-driven growth.”
He added: “As a corollary to all this, we are about to enter the post-verein era, where those arrangements just have not delivered the level of practice and cultural integration that a full merger can accomplish.”
Taylor Wessing is structured as a Swiss verein, with regional arms that operate under a shared brand but as mostly separate legal and financial entities. The firm was formed in 2002 through the combination of UK firm Taylor Joynson Garrett and German firm Wessing & Berenberg-Gossler. It later expanded into a host of other European countries having established itself as a Swiss verein in 2028.
The merger will see Taylor Wessing’s UK business, which includes lawyers in the UK, Ireland, Dubai and San Francisco, split from the verein at the end of next April in order to merge with Winston & Strawn. The verein’s Netherlands and Belgium arm is also set to leave the association and enter into an agreement to operate under the Winston Taylor brand.
The remainder of its members, however, will stick together and have already agreed to sign a cooperation agreement with Winston Taylor on 1 May 2026 to “ensure shared client work and cooperation with mutual clients will continue as normal”.
Gleghorn noted the parts of the verein not involved in the merger had “different strategic goals”, but “the strength of our relationship means we’ll carry on working together in a collaboration and referral relationship so that we can continue to deliver for our clients”.
Gleghorn will serve as managing partner of Europe and the Middle East for Winston Taylor and become a member of its executive committee, while Winston & Strawn chairman Steve D’Amore will continue as chairman of the combined firm.
Winston & Strawn is much the larger of the two, housing approximately 900 lawyers across 10 US offices as well as Brazil’s São Paulo and European bases in London, Paris and Brussels.
The merger will see Winston & Strawn transform its presence in London, where it currently has only 14 partners – relatively small for a leading US firm. That would potentially help a smooth integration with Taylor Wessing’s London base, which houses 118 partners, according to publicly available data tracked by Pirical. The firm would also expand into several new locations, adding 15 partners in Amsterdam, 13 in Eindhoven and 11 in Dublin, as well as five in Dubai and four in Cambridge.
Chicago-founded Winston & Strawn is known for its strength in high-stakes litigation, particularly in complex commercial, antitrust and sports law, and around 40% of the firm’s partners are part of its litigation practice, compared to 20% of Taylor Wessing UK’s. The firm brought in revenue of nearly $1.3bn in 2024 against profit per equity partner (PEP) of $3.5m, according to data published by Law.com.
Meanwhile, Taylor Wessing UK, which has around 400 lawyers, grew PEP 20% in FY25 to push past £1m for the first time, hitting £1.1m.
Given that difference in size, the merger is really more of a takeover, said Gibson of Edwards Gibson.
He added that “while there will be upsides for both parties, the very significant differential in partner profitability is going to make things challenging for a ‘one partnership’ model. Unless a high proportion of Taylor Wessing partners are de-equitised, there is going to be one hell of an equity spread”.
However, Peter Zeughauser, chair of law firm consultancy Zeughauser Group, noted that equity spreads within firms have been growing rapidly over the past decade.
“We’ve seen equity spreads double in size, if not much more,” he said. “What matters is if the partners are compensated well enough to retain them, and the mergers that we’ve seen wouldn’t have been approved unless the majority of the partners felt their compensation was fair.
“Winston & Strawn and Taylor Wessing merging would be a big leap forward for both firms, giving them that crucial scale in the US and UK. It’s noteworthy too that they’ve managed to work out an amicable agreement with the parts of the verein that aren’t included in the merger.”
Their planned tie-up comes amid increased merger activity involving US law firms, with 47 completed in the first three quarters of 2025, according to Fairfax Associates, up from 43 in 2024.
WarwickPlace Legal’s Bata predicted there was “much more to come” when it came to international deals, with his consultancy “seeing enormous interest from major players, ranging from leading internationals to regionals to classic independents, in developing and executing cross-border market entry strategies”.
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