Two of Everything

"We are either a united people, or we are not. If the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation." — George Washington, letter to James Madison, 1785

Keeping with a patriotic theme for July, I have been reflecting on unions. This musing has been helped by the parade of merger coverage across my dashboards. Hogan Lovells Cadwalader went live on the first of July, roughly $3.9 billion in combined revenue and about 3,200 lawyers, billed as the largest law firm merger ever. A month before that, Winston & Strawn and the UK-led side of Taylor Wessing became Winston Taylor, some 1,400 lawyers across twenty offices.

Mergers are decided somewhere far above my desk, by people weighing questions I have never been asked to weigh. I would not presume to make this note a commentary on the merits and pitfalls of such business decisions. I have the view from the pricing floor, cozied next to BD and LPM, where the consequences of a union are fractals of strategy and risk assessment. Though the decisions may be made in rooms floors away from our desks, asking the follow-up questions through a lens of business operations is worth exploring.

Fifty-nine law firm mergers were completed in 2025, up 18% from fifty the year before, and for the first time since 2020, seven of them joined two firms of at least 100 lawyers each. Sixteen more were already announced for 2026 when Fairfax published its year-end report, including three where both firms bring more than 400 lawyers. Cross-border combinations are the rising slice. Whatever is driving this, and the reported reasons range from technology costs to the widening gap between what large and midsize firms can charge, the trend line is not subtle. The two unions in my feed this summer are not exceptions to this new pattern.

When firms merge, in addition to new letterheads and emails, there is a new rate calibration that often arrives on the pricing desk. Two standard rate cards. Two sets of client rate agreements, each one the fossil record of a specific negotiation. Two discount ledgers, two e-billing configurations, two realization histories that took years to settle. Anyone who has moved in with a romantic partner will be familiar with this inventory problem. A merger often runs the same exercise at institutional scale, and the commercial inventory is the part nobody photographs for the press release.

When dealing with new and at times conflicting data one must wonder: what does a union do to the price of legal work?

At the risk of fatiguing the reader the answer is once again it depends. On the client side, the honest answer is that I don't know, and I would distrust anyone outside those walls who claims to. The available data offers one soothing possibility and one unsettling one, and they may both be true. The soothing one comes from the Thomson Reuters Law Firm Rates Report 2026, which found that firms running very different rate and discounting strategies end up collecting roughly the same amount per hour. If that finding holds inside a merger, the two ledgers may already sit closer together than the sticker rates imply; the market harmonized the firms years before their partnerships voted. The unsettling one is Fairfax's observation that rates correlate with firm size, and that the rate gap between large firms and everyone else is widening. A client of the smaller legacy firm might reasonably wonder which direction harmonization runs. I can pose that question. I cannot answer it, and I notice the coverage mostly doesn't either.

The cost side is where my month got interesting, because here the trade press has receipts. When Winston Taylor went live, RollOnFriday reported the firm promising to tackle its post-merger pay gaps, with sources noting that some legacy Winston associates in London earn significantly more than legacy senior Taylor lawyers. The Hogan Lovells Cadwalader combination carries the same trend: legal press coverage has Cadwalader's London associates staying on American pay, around £170,000 for a first-year, while legacy Hogan Lovells associates remain on the firm's London model, closer to £140,000. I first heard a version of this secondhand and assumed it was exaggerated, yet the records don't lie.

Within a single firm, on one market, two associates a few desks apart can now cost meaningfully different amounts for the same year of qualification. It's a little reminiscent of the early republic. On the eve of the Revolution, a Spanish dollar, the very same coin, was worth six shillings in Boston, eight in New York, seven and six in Philadelphia. Carry it across a colony line and its value changed without a single grain of silver leaving your pocket. One country, several exchange rates, and the disagreement survived a war fought as a unified front. The Federal Mint didn't open until 1792, nine years after that war ended, and old habits of counting lingered well past it. Political union came first. What the money was actually worth took a generation longer to settle.

When pricing professionals talk about the cost of a matter, we almost always mean the hours we would charge out at a given rate, which is a revenue figure no matter what we call it. What a lawyer actually costs the firm to keep on staff, salary, bonus, benefits, the office behind the door with her name on it, rarely enters the conversation at all. A merger makes that gap hard to ignore. Two lawyers can carry the identical title and the identical line on the rate card, and still cost the firm two different amounts to retain, and for once there is a clean number to prove it.

Margin on identical work becomes a function of which legacy comp scale happens to staff it, not of skill or efficiency, and nobody set out to build it that way. When a client asks for a blended rate, the easy answer is to blend the card. The harder question, the one I would want answered if I sat on that desk, is whether anyone is pricing to what the lawyer actually costs the firm, or only to what the card says to charge. I don't know how the pricing teams inside these firms are answering it, and I mean that as curiosity rather than critique. Most of us have never had two real costs for the same title sitting side by side to compare. They do, for now.

The last question I have been reflecting on is one I haven't seen written about much, which is what all of this means for business services.

There is a piece of integration arithmetic consultants use for the professional staff: business functions in a merger are expected to combine to something like 1.2 to 1.5 times one firm's headcount, not two. Alvarez & Marsal's framework offers the plain example: two finance departments of forty become a team of roughly sixty. The people running the harmonization are, at the same time, the subjects of one. The pricing team reconciling two rate cards knows that the merged firm will eventually want one pricing team too. Same for two marketing departments pitching one brand, and two BD teams now selling across a combined client book, which, to be fair, is the stated upside: Winston Taylor's launch announcement counted dozens of new cross-border opportunities in its first weeks.

I keep thinking about the choice buried in that consolidation. A transatlantic firm doesn't only pick between two billing systems. It picks, in effect, which commercial nervous system survives: the one fluent in American matter economics or the one fluent in European fee cultures, panel structures, and clients who buy differently. Perhaps the answer is both, and the combined function becomes genuinely bilingual. That would be the optimistic reading, and it would make these merged pricing and LPM teams some of the most interesting places in the profession to sit. The other reading is that one ledger's habits become the union's.

In practice, two rate cards rarely coexist for long. One wins, often the acquirer's, sometimes just the more disciplined firm's, while legacy clients get a grace period before they're folded into it. The real decision a merger forces isn't whether rates go up. It's whose discounting habits, whose realization assumptions, whose sense of what a matter is worth becomes the default for a firm that didn't exist a year ago. Somebody makes that call, deliberately or by default. The moment worth watching isn't the launch party. It's the fold-in, and whether pricing had a vote in it.