Wes Misson, global managing partner for the finance practice at Hogan Lovells Cadwalader, sums up how Charlotte, North Carolina, has changed over the last year: ‘It’s an interesting market we’re now in. It’s very frothy – people move all the time.’
The city, which is home to some of the US’s largest financial institutions, including Bank of America, saw a surge in activity towards the end of last year, when two firms opened within weeks of each other – Proskauer and Orrick, both of which launched with multi-partner hires from legacy Cadwalader.
Paul Hastings followed soon after, opening in January with a 15-lawyer team from Cadwalader and Haynes Boone.
‘It’s interesting that Proskauer, Orrick, and Paul Hastings have moved in,’ says Craig Donaldson, managing director on the Southeast in-house counsel and partner practice teams at Major Lindsey & Africa. ‘That’s a ‘ring the bell’ moment.’
Other major firms are also making moves that point to growing interest in the market. Earlier this year, Sidley Austin took on a Cadwalader fund finance team that includes several lawyers based in Charlotte, including counsel Ashley Mizzer, with the team’s head Leah Edelboim describing Charlotte as ‘a huge epicentre for funds finance, and a really important place to have a presence for this practice area.’
‘We’re watching the market closely,’ said Sidley management committee chair Yvette Ostolaza. ‘It’s one of those cities that’s becoming more important for our clients. There are talented Charlotte-based lawyers with a national practice who are attracted to our balanced platform.’
Last year, meanwhile, Kirkland & Ellis recruited Dechert funds partner Lindsay Trapp, who was based in Charlotte at Dechert, and who now splits her time between Charlotte and New York.
On top of this, with the July completion of the Hogan Lovells-Cadwalader merger, Charlotte is now a key location for one of the world’s top five firms by revenue.
Misson (pictured right), who was previously co-managing partner at Cadwalader, explains: ‘We’re the third largest office in the Americas, and the fifth or sixth largest globally. We’re also a key power centre, with a heavy concentration of management.’
Following the merger, the office is now home to five partners with office, practice, or regional management roles, including practice co-heads for banking and loan finance, fund finance, and real estate.
With all this change, the city has surged in status and visibility. ‘Charlotte really isn’t emerging any more,’ says Donaldson. ‘It’s arrived.’
A market on the up
The impact of the new entrants has been significant. According to data from SurePoint, the number of lateral hires into top 100 firms in Charlotte has nearly doubled over the last four years, from just 15 in 2022 to 29 in 2025.
This 93% increase is significantly larger than those seen in other US markets. Lateral hiring in Boston increased by just over 69% in the same period, while the three Texas cities of Houston, Dallas, and Austin, all saw drops, as did Philadelphia.
Despite the increase, lateral activity in Charlotte remains well below that seen in other US cities, with 29 hires in 2025 trailing Dallas (62), Boston and Houston (83), Chicago (133) and Los Angeles (145), not to mention Washington DC and New York, with around 400 and 500 moves respectively.
The small relative size of the market in Charlotte has raised questions over how much expansion it can sustain, with many partners noting a slowdown after the late 2025 to early 2026 surge.
‘Charlotte is talent-rich, and we’re consumers of talent’
Orrick structured finance partner Nathan Spanheimer, who joined from Cadwalader to launch a Charlotte office, highlights this: ‘It’s not that Charlotte suddenly needs 2x the lawyers. But it probably does need 1.2x or 1.3x the lawyers.’
The pace of lateral activity has certainly slowed in recent months, though there have been some moves, including Womble Bond Dickinson‘s hire of a three-partner IP team from top local firm Moore & Van Allen in May, and Proskauer’s hire of Hunton Andrews Kurth counsel Bryon Mulligan the next month.
New entrants remain committed to cautious growth. ‘We’re looking to expand,’ says Spanheimer (pictured right) – though he does note potential supply constraints: ‘As we’re looking to expand, other firms will be looking to hold onto their people, or to expand themselves.’
The more established firms are bullish on the market too: ‘We are absolutely planning to expand,’ says Misson. ‘We’re always going to make strategic additions that will grow and enhance our market-leading practices.’
For an office that already stands at 90 lawyers, including 22 partners, this is a signal of confidence in both the supply of talent and Hogan Lovells Cadwalader’s ability to attract it.
Misson argues that the merger improves his firm’s proposition to laterals. ‘We can now recruit for this office in ways we couldn’t as legacy Cadwalader,’ he says. ‘We can pull people from different talent pools that we really weren’t swimming in before.’
He adds: ‘Charlotte is talent-rich, and we’re consumers of talent.’
Banking on growth
The debate over how much room Charlotte has for firms to expand is driven in part by how focused the city’s legal market is on banking and finance.
According to SurePoint, banking, along with practices such as finance and funds, accounted for the largest share of Charlotte laterals in 2023 and 2025. In 2022 and 2024, it was second, behind corporate and litigation respectively.
Last year, 11 lateral moves were in banking and finance – nearly 38% of the total. And when it came time to open in Charlotte, Proskauer, Orrick, and Paul Hastings all built their offices around finance.
Orrick’s Spanheimer explains the history behind this: ‘Forty to fifty years ago, Wells Fargo and Bank of America both came up out of Charlotte. By the late ’90s, you had a really interesting city: it’s sized like a smaller city, like Indianapolis or Richmond, but it has the biggest cluster of investment banks outside of New York.’
‘It’s a very different market than it was five years ago’
Despite this, Spanheimer argues that Charlotte is well placed to capitalise on changes in the broader economy: ‘As structured credit and private credit take off and gain more national importance, that places the spotlight on Charlotte.’
Tom Mitchell, chair and managing partner at Moore & Van Allen, takes a broader view. Recent activity in the legal sector reflects ‘demand that has been building steadily as the city’s economy has matured and diversified,’ he says, pointing to ‘the volume and complexity of work generated.’
Of course, this diversity has its limits. As elsewhere, partners argue that not all practices that are active in Charlotte fit on a national platform. While the city may have a wealth of legal work, much of it cannot sustain the higher rates that national and international firms charge.
But the city’s finance sector has been more than enough to sustain the recent Big Law boom. ‘It’s a very different market than it was five years ago,’ says Spanheimer – not just ‘because of all these firms,’ but ‘because of all these firms doing similar things.’
Boots on the ground
How and to what extent big law will expand in Charlotte remains an open question. But the city has a range of opportunities, including across the Southeast and further afield.
Stuart Goldstein (pictured right), deputy regional managing partner for the Americas at Hogan Lovells Cadwalader, argues that legacy Cadwalader was able to parlay its more specialised Charlotte platform into wider success: ‘We decided to come down here in 1996 because we saw where the city was going.’
‘We didn’t stay regional: we didn’t just work with Charlotte-based or Southeast-based businesses. We used the work we were doing here to build a national and international platform. Our businesses grew because our clients are international.’
For the newer entrants to the market – who each have well-established national and international platforms already – the approach to the city is different. ‘Charlotte is a hugely important city for the finance practice,’ says Spanheimer. ‘That said, Orrick didn’t open an office in Charlotte and hope that it could find people.’
‘Many of the power players sit in Charlotte’
For Hogan Lovells Cadwalader board member and real estate co-lead Holly Chamberlain (pictured below), a presence on the ground can be a ‘secret weapon’. ‘Sometimes, people just want to talk to someone sitting in the city of Charlotte – in the 704, as we call it,’ she says, referring to the city’s area code.
Tim Hicks, Charlotte office managing partner at Hogan Lovells Cadwalader, concurs: ‘In our clients, too, many of the power players sit in Charlotte. That gives us direct access to people just down the street.’
But, crucially for Hogan Lovells Cadwalader, that presence is backed by real weight. Goldstein explains: ‘One of the biggest challenges you have, both from an internal cultural perspective and with your clients, is the ability to deliver the firm.
‘Having a small outpost office, or even not having an office at all, not having people who are involved in firm management – all that makes it very difficult to make decisions for investment.’
He concludes: ‘To truly succeed, you can’t just have an outpost office. You need to embrace it.’
To be able to ‘deliver the firm’ in this way is without doubt an advantage. But when firms are becoming ever more location-agnostic in their attitude to talent, as one partner puts it, a specialised presence in a city dominated by one premium practice area has an appeal that is hard to deny.
