Welcome to the first Original Jurisdiction podcast episode of the new year, an opportune time to both reflect on 2025 and look ahead to 2026. To kick things off, I decided I wanted to interview a Biglaw leader, to get a sense of both the challenges and opportunities facing large law firms today.
I was delighted to be joined by Jon Van Gorp, who has served as the chair of Mayer Brown since 2021. A member of both the Am Law 100 and the Vault 100, Mayer Brown has around 2,000 lawyers, $2 billion in revenue, and 150 years of history. As for Jon, he’s a Chambers-ranked, leading practitioner in structured finance—and we began our conversation by discussing his distinguished career in practice.
We then moved on to discuss his leadership of Mayer Brown, which Jon views as a way of giving back to an institution that has given so much to him. We covered his approach to leadership, the firm’s strategic plan, and its approach to AI adoption.
But Jon was also willing to tackle topics that other Biglaw leaders have been avoiding, such as partner pay and the (rather fraught) relationship between the Trump administration and large law firms. Thanks to Jon for his time, insight, and willingness to discuss delicate—but incredibly important—issues.
Show Notes:
Jon D. Van Gorp bio, Mayer Brown LLP
Beyond cold hard cash, warm fuzzies are the way to a lawyer’s heart, firm chair says, by Jenna Greene for Reuters
Mayer Brown Chair On Why Law Leaders Need To Listen More, by Kevin Penton for Law360
Prefer reading to listening? For paid subscribers, a transcript of the entire episode appears below.
Sponsored by:
NexFirm helps Biglaw attorneys become founding partners. To learn more about how NexFirm can help you launch your firm, call 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment@nexfirm.com.
Three quick notes about this transcript. First, it has been cleaned up from the audio in ways that don’t alter substance—e.g., by deleting verbal filler or adding a word here or there to clarify meaning. Second, my interviewee has not reviewed this transcript, and any errors are mine. Third, because of length constraints, this newsletter may be truncated in email; to view the entire post, simply click on “View entire message” in your email app.
David Lat: Welcome to the Original Jurisdiction podcast. I’m your host, David Lat, author of a Substack newsletter about law and the legal profession also named Original Jurisdiction, which you can read and subscribe to at davidlat.substack.com. You’re listening to the eighty-eighth episode of this podcast, recorded on Thursday, January 8.
Thanks to this podcast’s sponsor, NexFirm. NexFirm helps Biglaw attorneys become founding partners. To learn more about how NexFirm can help you launch your firm, call 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment@nexfirm.com. Want to know who the guest will be for the next Original Jurisdiction podcast? Follow NexFirm on LinkedIn for a preview.
Happy new year. Today represents a logical time to both look back upon the past year and make plans for the year ahead. For this first episode of 2026, I was eager to interview a Biglaw leader, to get a sense of how 2025 treated their firm and to learn what’s on their mind as 2026 gets underway.
So I was delighted to welcome Jon Van Gorp. Since 2021, Jon has served as chair of Mayer Brown, one of the world’s leading law firms. A member of both the Am Law 100 and the Vault 100—rankings of the nation’s top 100 firms in terms of revenue and prestige, respectively—Mayer Brown traces its origins back to 1881. As for Jon, in addition to leading Mayer Brown, he’s a Chambers-ranked, leading practitioner in structured finance—described by one client as “the godfather of mortgage-backed securities” and “the most creative problem solver I ever found.”
In our wide-ranging and candid conversation, Jon and I discussed many interesting and important topics. After covering his distinguished career in practice, we focused on what it’s like to lead a Biglaw firm in 2026. I’m grateful to Jon for his willingness to tackle a number of subjects that other chairs might have shied away from, including partner compensation and relations between the Trump administration and large law firms. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Jon Van Gorp.
Jon, thank you so much for joining me.
Jon Van Gorp: David, thank you for having me. I’ve been looking forward to this.
DL: Let’s start at the beginning. Tell us about your background and your upbringing. Where did you grow up?
JVG: I grew up in Denver, Colorado, which has changed a lot since I grew up there, and it’s become a destination for a lot of people from other places. But when I was there, it was just a lot of people from the forgotten Mountain Time Zone. I had a really great childhood. My parents were both teachers, so we spent the summers traveling and learning—and I became a lifelong learner because of them. And I have a great job, because as a lawyer, you can learn something new every day.
DL: You mentioned your parents were teachers. What levels did they teach at?
JVG: My dad was a high school science teacher and my mom was a preschool teacher, so the beginning and the end. Both loved mentoring and developing talent, and that rubbed off on me a little bit. My dad started a pre-med program at his high school and was delighted when people would come back after graduating from medical school and say, “I’m now a transplant surgeon because of your program in high school.” There’s nothing more rewarding than seeing people that you’ve mentored succeed. Part of practicing in a law firm is you get to do that a lot, and it’s really rewarding.
DL: Wow. I just got a chill as you said that, actually. I totally agree with you; it’s really wonderful.
So it’s interesting: your father was on the science side and did this pre-med program, but you did not go down the medical path.
JVG: He would’ve liked that. And I didn’t have any lawyers in my family, so for me, law school was a happy accident. I wanted to go to business school; I couldn’t get in because I didn’t have work experience. And I wanted to go to school after college, so I pivoted to law school.
My law school search was not the most diligent, analytical search that you could have come up with. I wanted to go to school in a warm climate. So I spent my time looking at California, Arizona, and Texas—which, growing up in Denver, is what I knew as warm climates. It worked out for me: I met my wife in law school, so I always have to say that my law school was the best law school for me. I’m on the board of the law school now, and I give back to the place because it did a great job educating me.
But when I talk to students interested in law school—and I do a lot of that with my college, talking to students like me who’ve never seen or heard about a lawyer because of their family situation and exposure—I say to cast your net a little bit more broadly and look beyond just the climate. Because you can always work anywhere after law school, but getting into the best law school you can get into is usually a pretty good strategy, as opposed to looking at the weather in the environment around the law school. But we all make choices in life and some work out, some don’t—and for me, it all worked out, so I can’t be happier with my law school choice.
DL: Yes—you were at SMU Dedman, which is a great law school. I spoke there a number of years ago; it has a beautiful campus, actually. I was really impressed by it.
JVG: Dallas is booming, David. I go down there quite a bit, and every time I go down there, it’s just grown 10 percent. So we’ve definitely seen population shifts into Texas—and for us as a firm, it’s a big priority. We have an office in Houston, and continuing to develop in Texas is making a lot of sense to us, given how much business and people are moving there.
DL: What kind of career did you have in mind for yourself when you went to law school? I’m guessing that maybe like me—a first-generation lawyer, at least here in the U.S.—you did not have a good sense of practice areas.
JVG: I didn’t at all. When I chose the classes I took in law school, I had a friend in law school whose dad was a litigator, and his dad would tell him what classes to take, and I’d take those classes—because I didn’t have anybody else giving me guidance. I didn’t really know what kind of work I would ultimately do.
I’ll tell you a story. It’s a good story for anybody who’s got some level of anxiety about “what am I going to be when I grow up,” which can be somebody in their fifties who’s trying to figure out what they really want to do. I ended up having a couple of clerkships in law school in places that you wouldn’t normally think of—Beaumont, Texas, and Corpus Christi, Texas—but those were the jobs I was able to get. When I was a third-year in law school, a good friend’s mom was at the largest firm in Dallas, doing oil and gas finance. My friend said, “My mom needs to hire somebody because the practice is really booming. Would you be interested in that? You’d be a good fit. You had a business degree in undergrad, and you’re interested in this. Why don’t you interview for the job?” And I did, I got the job, and it was perfect for me, because it took the background I had in finance and put it to work with the legal concepts that came very naturally to me because I understood the business side of it.
But it was just one of those things—you probably read the book Blink—that happens in your life. I’m sure you have stories like that where you look back and you’re like, “What if she hadn’t been my friend? What if she hadn’t introduced me to her mother?” So it’s one of those moments that put me on a path to what I do today. And I often look back at that as a pretty meaningful moment for me, because like you, I didn’t have a father or some other person in my life who was saying, “This is what the law career looks like, and this is what you should do.”
My wife is a fourth-generation lawyer. So she came from a much different background than I did, and she has a lot of appreciation for people like you and me who are figuring it out on their own. And there’s a lot of luck involved in that, but there’s also a lot of opportunity to make a difference. So I always try to talk to those students who don’t have that guidance, because just like the story I told about my friend, you can make a big difference.
DL: I love that story—and it’s actually consistent with a number of the stories of my past guests. I have some guests who knew from age six that they wanted to be a trial lawyer, and that’s what they ended up doing—but I would say the more common thing is lawyers who are now at the top of their practice area who stumbled into that practice area. Maybe they got a random assignment as a summer associate. Maybe they were trying to scramble for a job in an economic downturn, and that was the practice area that was busy. So I really love that story because it shows that even people at the top of their fields benefit a lot from things that are fortuitous and lucky, as opposed to, “Oh, I had a plan for world conquest, and I just executed it flawlessly.”
JVG: Yeah, life comes at you pretty quickly. The best-laid plans are rarely able to be achieved. And being open to opportunity is a big part of being successful.
DL: So tell us, what was your first job out of law school then? Was it related to the work you had done for your friend’s mom?
JVG: So I had the clerkships in the two Texas cities that I mentioned. At that time, I had a new relationship with my wife, who was a third-year in law school, just like me, and she wanted us to be in the same city. And being in Dallas—she ended up starting her career in Fort Worth, which is adjacent to Dallas—gave us more opportunities to both find a job in the same city.
So I found my job through the connection I had with my friend. My wife found her job because she was a research assistant for the dean of the law school, and he helped her find a job. So for everybody who thinks you have to get a fancy summer clerkship to have a job at a big law firm, you don’t. There’s front doors, there’s side doors, there’s back doors. Your network is really important.
So that’s how I ended up landing at Thompson & Knight in Dallas, which was the premier destination for oil and gas finance at the time. They needed help, and I was the only associate in my class in the group. So I had a great experience because I had five partners who spent a lot of time training and developing me, and those three years that I spent at Thompson & Knight were really, really valuable, in terms of the base foundation that I needed to practice law for the rest of my career.
DL: So Thompson & Knight was a great firm, and now it is part of Holland & Knight, which is another very impressive firm. But you have spent the bulk of your career, almost 30 years, at your current firm, Mayer Brown. How did you make the jump from Thompson & Knight to Mayer Brown?
JVG: I mentioned my wife’s family. Her dad was the regional general counsel for Citibank, so we decided that we wanted to be in Denver or Chicago, near our families. And at that time, Chicago seemed to offer much more opportunity, so her dad helped guide me through the law firms in Chicago where I could potentially be useful.
I met a guy at Mayer Brown, Jason Kravitt, who is the godfather of structured finance. He and I hit it off when we met, and he said, “Jon, I’d like you to work here.” And I said, “Great, Jason, but I got to find my wife a job.” And he said, “Oh, well, she can just work here, too.” And I said, “I’m not going to work in the same firm with my wife.” And to his credit, he said, “Well, I’m going to find her a job.” And so he worked his network in Chicago and she was hired by Lord Bissell, which has gone through several different mergers—and that’s a whole other story we won’t get into—but that’s where she started.
So about a year after Jason said, “I want you to work here,” my wife and I both showed up with jobs in Chicago. And I started focusing exclusively at that point on structured finance, which was a really good time to do that because it was an emerging new field. And somebody like me, who was ambitious but younger, could build a brand and didn’t have to wait behind lots of other people that were already in the pipeline.
And you’ll find that in law firms. If you’re doing things that the firm’s been doing for 145 years, there are usually people ahead of you that are going to have to be navigated for you to continue to progress, and that’s just a part of it. But if you’re in something brand-new, then that’s not the case. And I was fortunate that I found this. I really loved it because it’s creative, there’s innovation, and it was a new field. I really loved being at that inflection point in the market, where we were just really figuring it out on the fly and developing new things, and I had a great mentor in Jason. So my associate life at Mayer Brown was very good.
DL: There are many things that can be securitized, and structured finance, like many areas of law, has gone through an evolution. At the time that you started, was there something that was predominant, or were you doing a mix of different things? What was it like when you started in the field all those years ago?
JVG: When I started in the field all those years ago, it was really mortgage, auto, and student loans, the normal consumer assets that people were securitizing. That’s now grown into a tremendous market where anything that’s a payment stream is possible to securitize, but it started with pretty basic ideas, which is we can take 1,000 different auto or mortgage loans, bundle them together, and maybe some of them will default, but they all won’t default. So it’s a pretty safe investment for somebody who is looking for a fixed-income investment, because the probabilities over this pool of assets make it pretty possible for us to pay interest and principal at the time that we said we’d pay it. And that’s really the philosophy behind structured finance.
Now, obviously, that got challenged pretty severely in the great financial crisis. “May you live in interesting times,” I say to my kids—and I, certainly, did then, because it was Lehman Brothers, it was The Big Short, and it was all of that. And I had a front-row seat for everything. But the basic principle was always the same: you take a lot of your obligations, you put them together, and some of them won’t perform, but, overall, they will perform, and that provides a pretty safe foundation that you can issue some debt off of. And that’s what we did for basic assets, as I mentioned, but then it spread out to almost anything, and today’s practice is very, very vibrant and dynamic and innovative. People are securitizing whole businesses, restaurants, data centers—and it’s really technology that now is ubiquitous across the marketplace, but it was in its infancy when I started.
DL: I recently interviewed a finance partner—not one focused on structured finance, but more general finance, bank loans, private credit, what have you. And I asked him, “What is some big-picture change that you’ve seen over your practice area over the decades?” And he talked about was how the field’s become more complex, and what used to be these relationships of general trust have maybe been supplanted by more complex and detailed agreements. He talked about how a credit agreement back in the day might have been just a handful of pages, and now they’re very, very lengthy.
What is a change that you would identify in your own practice area, over the 20-plus years that you’ve been in it?
JVG: That’s a really great question. The change that I’ve seen is the expectations in terms of speed to market have increased significantly, because that’s the key to making the financing efficient. Once you’ve decided that you’re going to execute the transaction, the lawyers need to get it done as quickly as possible. And given technology today—and that’s been a huge part of what has driven the efficiencies in the marketplace—that’s possible.
I sent the first PDF file out of the firm in 1998. I was doing securitizations in Australia, and I would fax—you probably remember this, David—I would fax the documents to Australia. We had this fax room. It was like 900 degrees in there. You’d go down there, you’d sit by this fax machine trying to fax 50 pages on a phone line to Australia, and it’d conk out always halfway through, and you’d have to restart. I was just pulling my hair out. And somebody said, “Hey, there’s this new thing called Acrobat,” which was Adobe’s PDF creator. And Acrobat Reader is free to download. So if you’ve got the software, you can create a PDF, and then if people have Acrobat Reader, they can open it. And then there’s this thing called email, and you can attach the PDF to an email. And I’m like, “This is great, because I’m going to make my life better. I won’t be spending the night in the fax room.” So I sent out documents to Australia by PDF.
Now in the U.S., I started doing that, too. The problem was, my night used to end at 9:00, because that was the deadline for FedEx and UPS, and if you didn’t get it into the overnight, you didn’t get it in—work on it tomorrow. Now there was no deadline to when you sent something out, and no deadline to when somebody could open it and work on it.
That’s just one example—I can give you several more—and AI is going to be another inflection point in the practice that just makes expectations increase, because efficiency is higher and people can get more done faster. And how to figure out as a lawyer to play the right role in that, and embrace it, is what I talk to my people a lot about. The PDF made my life so much better. It was a tool, though. It didn’t replace me; it made me better.
And when you think about AI, people are spooked, thinking, “I’m going to be irrelevant. AI is going to take over my work.” And I keep saying, “It’s a tool.” It’s like the PDF; it’s like the story I told you. Use it to make you better, and then it won’t replace you. But if you’re not embracing it, then you aren’t in control. It is powerful technology, and you need to get up to speed. And I set the tone here as the leader; I spend a lot of time on AI. You’ve got to have it be a top-down strategy. It’s not going to be something that people just pick up unless they think it’s part of the strategic mission of the place, and I’ve got to go first on that. So I’ve been spending a lot of time on AI, and I’m encouraging everybody here to do it.
DL: I love your point about the speed to market, because when you’re doing these giant securitizations and financings, the deals are often structured based on market conditions, and if there’s a big delay between when the deal is designed and when you actually execute on it, that could be a problem. So it makes perfect sense to me—and a lot of that increased speed is enabled by technology.
Before we turn to what I really want to focus on—namely, your firm leadership, which includes leading the way on AI—let me just ask you one last question about your career as a lawyer serving clients. Looking back over your career as a lawyer, as opposed to a law firm leader, is there a client matter or representation of which you’re most proud? Because you’ve worked on a number of firsts over the course of your career. You’ve been called the godfather of mortgage-backed securities; you’ve done a lot of firsts besides the first PDF to Australia. So what’s a deal, or deals if you have to name a couple, that you’re particularly proud of?
JVG: As I said earlier, the credit crisis was, for me, a good thing, because it offered a lot of opportunity to provide creative solutions to problems. And there was a lot of distress in the market around the events that triggered that. In fact, I found in a drawer a Lehman Brothers pin that I had picked up when I was at Lehman Brothers, working with them on a deal. I gave it to my son, who thought it was fascinating, because he’s a huge fan of The Big Short. But it just reminded me that it wasn’t that long ago.
There was just a lot going on at that time in the world, and there were a lot of things that were happening that had never happened before. Governments were stepping in with rescue packages. We saw it in the U.S.; we saw it in Europe. It was really a huge effort to try to stabilize the economy and find a way forward. And I was really proud of what was achieved by a lot of different people who were able to bring order to what was a fairly disorderly situation, and get things back on track again.
One of the deals I handled during that time was an M&A transaction in which a European bank bought a financial-guarantee insurance provider in the U.S., which was very long on mortgage-backed and subprime mortgage-backed securities risk. It was a distressed situation, and the client of ours that bought the company said, “Well, we want to buy the company, but not this $13 billion piece of it, because we don’t like these insurance policies that were issued by this part of the company.”
Well, the deal was not a deal that could get done by going out to the insurance policyholders and asking them to agree to it. So our client had to buy that $13 billion part of the company, but they had to convince the rating agencies—which was critical to their going-forward plan as an insurance company—that they weren’t exposed to the risk of that part of the company. So they came to me and they said, “Can you design something for us? We have a guarantee from the French government and the Belgian government for two to three years on the value of this, but then that guarantee goes away, and the risk goes on much longer than that. Can you come up with something that will protect us from the risk of this part of the business and satisfy the rating agencies?”
So I created a credit default swap that was regularly collateralized, so that it always provided an ability for the client to unwind it, if there was increased exposure, and protect against that risk. The credit default swap was guaranteed by these government entities. And then at the last moment, they guaranteed the posting of collateral, to secure the exposure on the swap. And then every week or two weeks, the collateral was checked for compliance. And if it wasn’t in compliance, the company could wind down the swap and take the collateral.
And so it protected them in a way that satisfied the rating agencies and got the deal done. Their rating was affirmed. I was really proud of that, because it was a sticky situation that needed to be navigated, and we had a very distressed seller on the other side of the transaction, with limited government commitment (it was a whole commitment, but for a limited period of time). So I look at that—it won a Financial Times Innovation Award—as one of my best accomplishments, because I was able to come up with something new and creative. And doing something for the first time, solving a problem—at least for me, that’s the most rewarding part of being a lawyer.
DL: That’s brilliant. And it’s interesting, I do feel that times of crisis often enable lawyers to do some of their finest work; one of my past podcast guests was Rodge Cohen from Sullivan & Cromwell, was also extremely busy during that time. So congratulations to you and your client on that. That’s amazing.
Turning to law firm leadership, you’ve been chair of Mayer Brown since 2021, but like many chairs, you’ve held prior leadership positions. You served on the management committee. You were a co-leader of the banking and finance, capital markets, and structured finance practices. You had a very successful and very busy practice as a structured finance lawyer. What inspired you to enter firm leadership? A lot of people might say, “Oh, gosh—isn’t that just headache?”
JVG: Yeah, that’s what a lot of people say. This firm was very good to me. I had so much opportunity here, so much support. I was able to build this large practice. I had a great team that worked with me. They were capable of taking it forward and growing it, which they have done. And I felt like I wanted to give back to the firm, to see if I could take some of the things that I had implemented in my practice, and ideas that I had used to grow it, and use those on a bigger scale, to help the firm overall be more strategic, more focused, and more successful. So I saw that as a really fun, challenging, and interesting professional opportunity, and as a result, I was delighted to do it.
Law firms do not do well when they bring in a CEO from the outside. Law firms usually have somebody like me, who has been there for a long time and been able to have some success, step into the role. And that’s because it’s such an intimate relationship you have with the partnership: you’ve got to know the partners, they have to know you, they have to have trust and confidence in you. It’s very important, in order for the leader to be successful, that they have that level of support and confidence. And it’s very hard for somebody to just come in from another industry or, frankly, another law firm, and just start leading the place. So I also felt like I had built that up over a number of years, because I had these other roles, and I was able to build some trust and confidence through those roles. So, for me, this was the natural next step at the time that I was elevated to this role.
DL: Are you the managing partner of a boutique or midsize firm? If so, you know that your most important job is attracting and retaining top talent. It’s not easy, especially if your benefits don’t match up well with those of Biglaw firms or if your HR process feels “small time.” NexFirm has created an onboarding and benefits experience that rivals an Am Law 100 firm, so you can compete for the best talent at a price your firm can afford. Want to learn more? Contact NexFirm at 212-292-1002 or email betterbenefits@nexfirm.com.
Mayer Brown is a firm with almost 2,000 lawyers and $2 billion in revenue—and that was based on 2024, so I’m not sure what it is for 2025. Leading it is a very demanding job. On the other hand, going to your point about credibility with your partners, a lot of current and former law firm leaders I’ve had on the podcast have talked about how they find it valuable to still do a little bit of practice, so they know the challenges their partners are facing and the issues their clients are facing. As the head of this giant firm, do you still have time to practice, or do you still want to practice?
JVG: I do; the answer to those questions is yes and yes. I definitely am involved with the clients, many of whom have been clients that I’ve worked with for my whole career. And I’m a solutions guy, so I often get involved in creating solutions and designing something that we think will work to solve a problem. On the day-to-day stuff, it’s not really responsible for me to say, “I’m going to take the lead on that,” because then I’m immediately in a conflicted situation of, “I’ve got to put the client first, but something happened somewhere that I’ve got to deal with,” and that’s the nature of this job. So like most law firm leaders, you have to find some harmony in how you live in both worlds at the same time.
But for me, that’s definitely been the case. I still stay very close to the client base. I still stay very close to the structured finance industry, the developments in the industry, and how things have changed since I was doing the day-to-day work, so that if I needed to step in at any time, I could do that again. But that’s a challenge that every law firm leader feels, particularly when you’re trying to implement a strategy of doing something a little bit different, as I’ve tried to do over the last five years. There’s always a lot of work to do.
DL: Do you have a rough percentage of what time you spend on management versus client service?
JVG: I would say it’s about 90/10, meaning 90 percent on the management and 10 percent on the client side—but that’s 90/10 of not a 2,000-hour-a-year year, if you know what I mean. So that’s about all I can give, and I’m pretty much at personal capacity. But I like what I do, so I enjoy it. I get up every day, I want to go to work, I want to try to do something positive—and if I lost that, I’d really lose my edge. And I have bad days at work, like everybody, but I still wake up the next day and I want to come back here. And that’s a good thing.
DL: This is maybe a little bit of a digression, but you did allude to how you’re not working just 2,000 hours a year; you’re serving clients, and you’re running this giant firm. Not only that, but you’re a very hands-on leader. You send handwritten notes to colleagues who have done great things and you send them via snail mail, which really touched me. You are writing these client alerts about developments in the structured finance world—which again, you’d think, “Wow, he’s running this giant firm, and he has time to actually be that on top of substantive legal developments?” I believe you have a pet. You have a family. You do internal podcasts at the firm.
What tips do you have for those of us, myself included, who struggle with time management? Not that we have executive-function problems or something; it’s just there is so much to do.
JVG: I get this question a lot, David. The best advice I have is the “big rock” story. I don’t know if you’ve heard this before, but a professor got up in front of his class, he had a jar, he put a bunch of big rocks in it, and he asked, “Is this full?” And the class said, “Yes.” And he said, “No, it’s not.” And he poured sand into the glass, and it filled in around the rocks. And he said, “Is this full?” And the class said, “Okay, yes, it’s full.” And he said, “No.” And then he poured water into the glass. And his point was, if you don’t take the things that are important in your life and put them in the glass first, the other stuff isn’t going to allow them to be fit in, and you’re not going to be a very happy person. But if you take the big stuff and you put it in, and then you fill the other stuff around it, you’ll feel satisfied, because those important things are always going to be in the jar first.
For lawyers who can work 24 hours a day and never feel like they’re done—and that includes people right out of law school through me—it’s a very interesting career, in that it’s like being a student: you can study all the time, and there’s really no limit. We’re selling time here, so you can spend as much time on it as you will allow it to take up. And the people I find that have the most satisfying careers are the people who say, “Look, this part of my family life is really important. This hobby is really important to me. These holidays are really important to me.” Obviously, we’re in a client-demand service, and sometimes we have to forego plans because we just have to. But if you never make those plans, then you’ll never be able to carry through on them, and ultimately you’ll have a high level of burnout. So in my personal and professional life, I have big rocks that I put in the jar, and those are important things to me.
The other thing I’ll say is that you want to make sure that you’re doing work that you need to do and that you can’t delegate to somebody else. Even if that person isn’t as capable as you, they can get it 80 percent of the way there, 70 percent of the way there. That means your effort level went from 100 percent to 20 percent or 30 percent. And I find so many people that are lawyers, they’re control-oriented, they’re precise, they’re high achievers, they can’t accept the fact that people are learning, and they’re going to make mistakes, and you have to work with them. And investing in talent is rewarding because it’s rewarding from the standpoint of seeing people succeed, but it can also be rewarding in the ability of you to free up time by the people you’ve invested in doing other things. And the best example of that is the practice I have that’s continued and grown, when I’ve taken this role, because over the years I’ve mentored and developed a lot of lawyers who have been very successful here and are still here.
So those are the two pieces of advice I have. I don’t have any secret to it; I still struggle with it. But those are some big principles that help.
DL: That’s great advice. I had not heard the big-rock story. And as someone who just completed the travel planning for my kids’ spring break, I feel I’ve put some rocks in there.
Let me ask you this. We’re recording this interview pretty early in 2026. Can you sum up, in a nutshell, how 2025 treated Mayer Brown?
JVG: It was a very good year for us. We had financial success, which was something that I’m always looking to achieve, but we had strategic success. When I wrote our strategic plan—we have a three-year strategic plan, and it’s in its last year of the three years of the current plan, which is called Reaching Our Potential—it struck me that we were very, very strong in some of the brands that we were known for, structured finance being one of them, finance generally being one of those brands, but we needed a bigger funnel. We needed more brands that were destinations for Mayer Brown, to create stability across our great international platform. And if you look at some of the activity in the market, you see that for “one strategy” firms, it’s a challenge. You want to have multiple brand strategies to create that bigger funnel, because things go hot and cold, and you want more stability in the kinds of things that you’re offering to clients.
So our strategy was designed to create some new brands and to do that by some internal structures that allowed us to accelerate the growth of those areas. And so for us, that was lending and private credit, insurance, energy infrastructure, capital markets, and white-collar enforcement. And we’ve been running with that for about a year now, and that’s complemented by a client team program that diversifies our client base with some of these new areas of focus. And we’ve done quite a bit of hiring in the lateral markets of talent into those areas.
So I feel like we’ve had financial success. But on the back of that, we’re also building a certain amount of resilience in the platform by developing brands and brand strength that complement the current strengths that we have. So that was really the idea here, and it’s taken a big effort by the management team—I have a great group of management committee members that work with me on the strategic plan implementation—but I feel pretty good about where we are. And we’re building a stronger firm for the future because of it.
DL: So I have a couple of observations in response to your great comments. First, your point about having multiple strong pillars is really important because some of the firms—and I won’t name names—that have had to merge in somewhat distressed situations were firms that perhaps weren’t sufficiently diversified. So it’s really sharp of you to be doing that.
Second, it makes total sense that you’re doing some lateral hiring because, whether folks like it or not, it really is very, very difficult if not impossible to sort of home-grow all your talent (despite the advantages of having people who spent most of their careers at one firm). And last year, I understand you brought in around 56 new partners, which was more than double from 26 from the prior year.
But here’s another thing I’ve noticed about lateral hiring. There’s been increased lateral partner movement, and there’s also been dramatically increased compensation, with some partners getting eight-figure compensation packages. Now, I know you believe there are many motivators for lawyers besides dollar signs; you’ve talked about that in interviews with various publications, including, I believe, Reuters. But how do you stay competitive, and how do you secure these almost 60 new partners, in a market where partners with great practices are increasingly costly?
JVG: It’s a good question. And to any lateral partner, you have to provide them something that is compelling, that is different than what they have. And these are the people you want to hire. I describe it as, “Bring your practice and your clients, and we have opportunities for you here, too.” So a lot of these hires have been into this accelerated growth plan where they see the focus and intention in the firm behind these areas and they see an opportunity for growth. And in some cases, we’ve even had clients who we’ve talked to leading us to candidates that they think would be more effective on our platform.
So it’s hard yards, for sure. It is one of the hardest ways to grow the firm. I would say promoting your talent and developing it internally and then doing acquisitions and mergers in the market is far easier in terms of growing your firm than lateral hiring. It’s hard, but it’s necessary. And I feel like we have a lot of focus on that right now and we’re having some success with it, which is great.
But yes, compensation is a factor, and there’s a market for compensation, and I haven’t found us losing out on people that we want because of compensation. So we’ve been very much where we need to be. It’s been really the reason of, “Yeah, the compensation is here, but you have the potential to do a lot better here because there’s this strategic value that you help us unlock. So you’re the key that goes into this lock that is closed right now, and it opens up this revenue stream, and you’ll be rewarded for that here when we’re able to open it.” That’s usually the pitch that I find most compelling—and those are the people you want to join, for the long run.
We don’t buy books of business here; we want strategic fits. And we’ve been pretty disciplined about that. And we will continue to be, because it’s got to be a “one plus one equals three” for the lateral partner, and it’s got to be the same for us.
DL: This is a bit of a digression, but I find that, to their credit, law students and young lawyers are much more knowledgeable about the business of law than I was when I was their age. I’m a little familiar with this next topic myself, because I did a short stint in legal recruiting before starting Original Jurisdiction after leaving Above the Law—but for those who are not familiar, can you explain how law firm compensation generally works? And how does the compensation package for a lateral differ?
Associates are used to getting their pay every two weeks, but partner pay is a little different. I don’t think some people understand the concept of draws, for example. How does it work for a regular, longstanding partner at the firm? And obviously you don’t need to give numbers, just the structure, but how does it work for a lateral? Because when a lateral leaves their very successful practice at another firm and comes to your platform for the “one plus one equals three,” they need some sort of downside protection, right?
JVG: Really good question—and I could spend an hour talking about this, but I’m trying to keep it to a minute or two, so I’ll make it very high-level and very simple.
Compensation systems vary law firm to law firm, as you probably know. The old way of doing it was called lockstep, where you were paid based on seniority, not based on merit. The idea was that everybody had merit because you had a bunch of really ambitious people practicing together, so you would just pay people more as they became more senior in the organization. That worked for a lot of firms, particularly the white-shoe firms in New York. Most have moved away from that to much more of a performance-based compensation system, but that was one way of doing it.
We’ve always had a performance-based compensation system here for all of our partners. We’ve also had an open comp system, where every equity partner at Mayer Brown can know what every equity partner makes. So there’s a certain amount of honesty and integrity that goes into this, including laterals who come in—their compensation is published. So everybody knows what everybody else makes. And our goal is to get as many partners as we possibly can onto a compensation program, which is what we have established here, where people have different shares of the net income of the firm that they have a right to based on our compensation awards, and therefore they benefit from the value of the firm increasing. That creates wonderful collective action, when you can do it that way.
When lateral partners come in, you’re right, sometimes they have a little different arrangement than just a share of the net income pool. They might have a guarantee of a particular amount for a period of time, so that they have time to bring over their clients and get comfortable on a platform, and it gives them some comfort in taking the risk of going from Firm A to Firm B. But we try as much as possible to get the lateral partners excited about and wanting to be part of our normal system of having a percentage interest in the net income pool, because that creates the collective-action event that we want, which is, “I do better if everybody does better. I want to cross-sell my clients to the firm. I want to help other clients of the firm achieve their objectives. Because everybody wins when I do that.”
DL: Just in terms of the mechanics, though—say I’m a regular partner. I get some kind of draw at a regular interval, and then I get some payments reflecting my share of the net income at various points in the year?
JVG: Correct. So it’s a small amount of money, but people get a monthly draw at the end of the month as equity partners. But most of their compensation is based on that share of net income, as the net income comes in. And partners in a structure like ours, they get paid last, after we’ve paid all our expenses and we have money to distribute. We are no different than any firm in that regard, in that we’re all owners of this business.
That’s interesting about law, by the way, and that’s a whole other podcast: is private equity going to buy law firms? That’s something on the horizon. But for right now, they’re owner-operated businesses, so the people producing the revenue are also owning the business. And so like an owner-operated business in any field, whether it’s an architecture firm, an accounting firm, or a construction company, we get paid when the expenses are paid, and there’s money to distribute. That happens throughout the year, and then it accelerates toward the end of the year, and then there may be distributions into the next year for the current year, because we’re still collecting income that we recognized in the current year into the next year.
DL: Let me ask you two more quick questions before we go to the speed round. My first question, and you touched on it earlier, is what is the firm’s approach to AI, particularly AI adoption?
JVG: It’s basically what I said. We’ve been in the Harvey pilot project for three years. I feel like we’ve been very forward-leaning on AI. About a year ago, we hired a chief technology officer who had a lot of experience, to help push us forward. It’s about the leadership adopting and expecting it. The mistake is thinking, “Well, let’s have the new law school grads who are more technologically advanced figure it out, and then it’ll kind of bubble up from below.” I think the opposite has to happen.
You’ve got to have the most senior people using it, learning how to use it, thinking about how to use it, because we know the applications that are possible, and then using the talent that’s here that might have more technological talent and advancement to make it work. So that’s been our approach. So I challenge our leadership all the time on AI, and we have an AI strategy here. And we’re now seeing clients expecting it. We have clients who ask us, on the face of the bill, “Tell me how much this bill was decreased by your use of generative AI.”
DL: Do you still have any clients who are nervous, who put in an engagement or retention letter, “Do not use AI on our matters”? Or are clients increasingly open to you using AI? Because two or three years ago, clients were nervous because of all these stories about lawyers who used it improperly. As you mentioned earlier, it’s just a tool, and tools can be misused. And so there was a period around two or three years ago where we had that thing about the lawyers who filed the ChatGPT brief in the Southern District of New York. But now you think clients are coming around to seeing more of the advantages rather than the dangers?
JVG: I think those stories are overtold. People find them to be sensational, but like anything, there’s going to be somebody who does something that they shouldn’t do and misuses technology. Those stories, in my opinion, have been few and far between. The kinds of things I’ve seen AI capable of doing to make us better are phenomenal, and its ability to summarize information in a very useful way is terrific. And the ability to help us sharpen writing and to help us analyze data is just getting better and better, every day. So if somebody files a ChatGPT brief, that’s certainly the outlier. I’m not seeing that routinely at my level of practice. And at Mayer Brown, I’m seeing people be very thoughtful about how they’re integrating it.
DL: I have one last question before we go to my speed round to four final questions. It would be podcast malpractice of me not to raise this, so I have to ask, although I understand if you have to be somewhat circumspect: what are your thoughts on the Trump administration’s stance vis-a-vis large law firms and firm’s responses thereto?
JVG: It’s just part of operating in a complex world. We’ve operated internationally for a very long time. And you remember the events with Russia and Ukraine, and we had to adapt to that, and we’ve had to adapt to some things in China. And this is just another one of those things that we’re all adapting to. You can control what you can control, and you’ve got to adapt to the environment around you.
Many different law firms have had challenges, people have made different decisions, and I have a lot of respect for all those law firm leaders. I know them well, and I know how they’ve adjusted and tried to deal with those challenges, and I have respect for all their decisions because everybody’s trying, based on what they know at the time, to make the best judgment they can. And that’s how we’ve navigated this issue and will navigate other issues, by being really thoughtful, really trying to think about what’s best for our firm and our people and moving forward.
There’s going to be more of this in the future, across the world, and we have about 35 percent of our people outside the U.S. So we have this across the world as we operate in the Middle East and Asia and South America and North America and Europe. We try to be thoughtful and we try to be pragmatic, and we try, most of all, to do what’s right for our people and our clients.
DL: Turning to my speed round, my first question is, what do you like the least about the law? And this can either be the practice of law or law as an abstract system.
JVG: What I don’t like about the law is that people have a negative impression of lawyers and see them as problems as opposed to solutions. And for people who don’t have a lot of exposure to lawyers, it’s worse than for those who do. I wish that were different. People still tell the Shakespeare jokes. Lawyers do a lot of good; I just wish we had better branding in the world, because I think we can make a difference. Hopefully I’ve given you some examples in this podcast. But there’s still a public perception that lawyers are a scourge on society and that we’d be better without lawyers. I don’t think that’s the case.
DL: I agree with you, and I think of this podcast as my small effort to contribute to the counternarrative. My second question is, what would you be if you were not a lawyer?
JVG: I’d probably be an architect because I love designing things and I’m very creative, and that was kind of my backup if law didn’t work out. What I’m doing in my practice and even in the firm’s strategy is designing things. So if I didn’t do this, I’d probably want to do that.
DL: My next question goes to what we were talking about earlier, about balancing everything. How much sleep do you get each night?
JVG: I’m a real sleep wimp. I try to get seven hours of sleep a night, and I find that to operate at the level I want to operate at for most of the day, I need to do that. So I’m fairly possessive of my sleep time.
DL: As am I—and I’m always inspired when I hear highly successful leaders who actually prioritize their sleep.
My last question is, any final words of wisdom, such as career advice or life advice, for my listeners?
JVG: My advice is, as I said very early on in the podcast, be open to opportunity. Look to the left. Look to the right. Don’t just look straight ahead. Opportunity can be disguised. But the law gives you a wonderful opportunity to unlock opportunity because you’re in generally a light structure in your environment. You don’t have 16 layers of people between you and the top of the mountain. It’s a very flat organizational structure. A place like Mayer Brown encourages entrepreneurship and exploration; take advantage of that as a lawyer. That is a unique aspect to the career.
There are some downsides, too, about being judged by the amount of time you spend, and we’re selling time here, which can create challenges. But the opportunity set is great. So be open to the opportunities and always be disciplined about looking to the left and to the right, because not everything will be directly in your vision, and if you don’t look to the left and the right, you may miss some of those opportunities, and those could have been great opportunities for the enhancement of your career.
DL: Speaking of opportunities, I have greatly enjoyed the opportunity to speak with you, Jon. Thank you so much for joining me.
JVG: David, thank you. It’s been great. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. I appreciate you having me on.
DL: Thanks so much to Jon for joining me. I found him incredibly insightful and personable, and after our conversation, I can understand why his partners elected him as chair of Mayer Brown.
Thanks to NexFirm for sponsoring the Original Jurisdiction podcast. NexFirm has helped many attorneys to leave Biglaw and launch firms of their own. To explore this opportunity, please contact NexFirm at 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment@nexfirm.com to learn more.
Thanks to Tommy Harron, my sound engineer here at Original Jurisdiction, and thanks to you, my listeners and readers. To connect with me, please email me at davidlat@substack.com, or find me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, at davidlat, and on Instagram and Threads at davidbenjaminlat.
If you enjoyed today’s episode, please rate, review, and subscribe. Please subscribe to the Original Jurisdiction newsletter if you don’t already, over at davidlat.substack.com. This podcast is free, but it’s made possible by paid subscriptions to the newsletter.
The next episode should appear on or about Wednesday, January 21. Until then, may your thinking be original and your jurisdiction free of defects.
Thanks for reading Original Jurisdiction, and thanks to my paid subscribers for making this publication possible. Subscribers get (1) access to Judicial Notice, my time-saving weekly roundup of the most notable news in the legal world; (2) additional stories reserved for paid subscribers; (3) transcripts of podcast interviews; and (4) the ability to comment on posts. You can email me at davidlat@substack.com with questions or comments, and you can share this post or subscribe using the buttons below.
