Private Equity Deals in 2026: Partner Hiring Outpaces Sponsor Work

Partners who look up private equity deal volume law firms rankings tend to read the deal count as a hiring signal: more sponsor deals, more room for another sponsor partner. This year the two numbers moved at different speeds. Sartori & Partners data show 1,300 dated deals with private equity lawyers on them in the 12 months to October 2026, for 699 distinct clients. On the settled windows, deal counts rose 10.4%. Lateral partner hiring into the practice rose 16.1%. The bench is growing faster than the work that feeds it, and almost all of that work comes from one kind of client.

Start with the work. Private equity deals rose 10.4% between the two settled windows, from 1,182 to 1,305. That is close to the whole deal market, where dated deals rose 10.6%, and a little ahead of corporate and M&A deals, which rose 9.5%. Private equity is not pulling away from the rest of transactional work on volume.

Hiring tells a different story. Lateral partner hires in private equity rose 16.1% over the same windows, from 404 to 469. Counting every level, private equity lateral moves rose 14.9%, so partners are the part of the market that accelerated most. Measured against the deal count, the settled window carried 2.8 private equity deals per lateral partner hire, against 2.9 a year earlier.

The gap is modest in any single year, but it compounds. A firm adding a sponsor partner now is competing for a share of a deal flow that grew in line with the market, against rivals that added partners faster than that. The lateral partner is easier to find than the mandate that pays for the hire. A business case should rest on deals the candidate will bring, not on growth in the practice as a whole.

In the Sartori & Partners deal records, financial sponsors are the client on 1,091 private equity deals, 83.9% of the total. Across all dated deals the same client group appears on 6.9%. No other sector comes close inside the practice: asset management and funds clients sit on 3.1% of private equity deals and technology and software clients on 2.2%.

A deal can be tagged with more than one sector, so the shares overlap and do not add up to a split. The concentration still matters for a hiring firm. A sponsor partner's book is a book of relationships with funds, not with the companies those funds buy. When fund managers slow their buying, the whole practice slows with them, and a partner hired on a sponsor book carries that exposure from the first day. Diligence on a candidate should ask how many sponsors give them repeat work and how much rests on one or two funds.

By type, private equity transactions account for 636 deals, or 48.9% of the practice's work. Venture and growth financings follow at 10.2%, plain M&A at 7.2% and fund formation at 2.1%. Some deals carry no type, so these shares do not reach the full count.

Across all dated deals, private equity transactions are only 3.7% and venture and growth deals 3.8%. The corporate group touches the same ground: private equity transactions are 5.1% of corporate and M&A deals. A private equity partner therefore competes with corporate colleagues for sponsor mandates, inside the firm as well as outside it.

For a hire, that sets the core skill. A candidate needs to run a sponsor acquisition or exit from term sheet to closing. Venture and growth experience adds a second source of work with real volume behind it. Fund formation is a small slice of this practice's deal count and belongs to a separate bench.

Only a minority of private equity deals publish a value: 10.5%, against 17.7% for corporate and M&A deals. Where the figure is public, the median private equity deal is $425 million. The corporate median is $315 million.

Treat the median as a rough size, not a price list: sponsors keep most terms private, and the deals that do disclose a value lean toward the larger end. The direction is still useful. Sponsor work brings larger tickets per mandate, which is part of why firms keep paying for sponsor partners even while deal growth tracks the market. A candidate with a smaller but steady flow of disclosed sponsor deals can be worth more than the count alone suggests.

Sartori & Partners counts put Latham & Watkins and Ropes & Gray first by private equity deals, both in the 101-150 band of deals advised. Kirkland & Ellis follows in the 61-100 band, and the last five places of the top 10 sit in the 21-40 band.

Five of the ten names on the deal table also appear among the most active lateral partner hirers in the practice. Kirkland & Ellis ranks 3rd among partner hirers, and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett ranks 8th by deals. Every firm on the partner list hired in the 6-10 band of partners or above.

The busiest sponsor firms are buying partners as well as winning deals, which keeps candidates with portable sponsor relationships in short supply. A firm outside these tables will rarely win that contest on money. It can win on fit: a platform where a partner's sponsor clients get more of what they buy, from finance and tax to fund work, without the conflicts of a larger sponsor bench.

Price the hire against the work, not the hiring market. Lateral partner hires in private equity rose 16.1% while deals rose 10.4%, so each new sponsor partner joins a practice where the deal flow per partner is thinning slightly. Ask every candidate for the sponsors that send them repeat mandates and test that list against your own conflicts before an offer.

Accept the sponsor dependence and plan for it. With financial sponsors on 83.9% of deals, a private equity group rises and falls with fund activity. Pair a buyout hire with venture and growth capability or with the finance and funds partners sponsors also use, so the group has work when buyouts slow. Move early on the few candidates who bring both a sponsor book and disclosed deals of scale: the firms on the tables above are hiring the same people.