So which firms carry the deepest CLO benches?

Pirical pulled the partner-level data across the Am Law 200, counting partners known to be active in CLO work. The picture isn't what you'd guess from the usual league tables. Dechert tops it with 25 CLO partners, well clear of the field. Sidley Austin follows at 21, then Mayer Brown at 17. After that comes a tight cluster — Alston & Bird at 14, Paul Hastings at 13, and a five-way logjam at 12 that mixes the expected (Kirkland & Ellis, Cadwalader) with specialists you might not have flagged (Chapman and Cutler, Polsinelli, McDermott Will & Schulte). That mix is the real story. Raw prestige doesn't predict CLO depth. Structured-finance specialism does, and several mid-market and securitization-focused shops out-bench the white-shoe giants here.

Am Law 200 Firms by CLO Partner Count

The Work That Stood Out

Numbers tell you who's deep, not who's doing the interesting stuff. So here's a tour weighted toward novelty, scale, and legal complexity rather than deal count.



Start with the structural firsts, most running through Michael Sweeney at Sidley Austin. He handled Greystone's first-ever 100%-healthcare-backed CRE CLO, collateralized entirely by bridge loans on healthcare and senior-living properties. He did Invesco Commercial Real Estate Finance Trust's inaugural CRE CLO, the largest in the U.S. in three years. And for Starwood Property Trust he built CLOs backed entirely by infrastructure loans plus the first-ever 100%-fixed-rate-loan CRE CLO. Three firsts, one practice.

Scale and engineering show up elsewhere. At White & Case, Elizabeth Devine launched Antares Capital's $2.1bn CLO platform, the largest post-crisis CLO. Howard Goldwasser at O'Melveny worked on the first CLO 2.0 transactions after 2008, some using collateral as exotic as airline-ticket receivables — work that helped rebuild the market from the rubble of the crisis.

Then the contentious end, rare in this deal-driven world. William Hao at Alston & Bird served as indenture trustee in the Zohar CLO Chapter 11 saga, one of the most litigated distressed-CLO messes around. Patrick Hayden, also at Alston & Bird, handled a $1.4bn CDO interpleader and a $375m synthetic CDO liquidation as trustee.

A few deals fit no neat box, and those are often the most telling. Jonathan Cho at A&O Shearman pairs securitization and CLO structuring opinions with digital-asset and crypto-custody insolvency work — bankruptcy-remoteness analysis colliding with crypto, which almost nobody was doing a few years ago. On the M&A side, the niche is buying and selling the managers themselves: Shawn Kodes at Paul Hastings advised Atalaya Capital on its acquisition of CLO manager Teles Asset Management. And Richard Shamos at Akin worked a $250m seed investment into a CLO equity manager through a bespoke fund structure — coming at CLOs from the capital-formation side rather than the deal side.

Where CLO Partners Come From, And What They Do

Step back from the deals and the people behind them start to rhyme. Look at where they trained and what they practice, and a clear profile emerges.

The pipeline runs through a handful of New York–anchored schools. NYU leads by a wide margin with 38 CLO partners, then Columbia at 30 and Fordham at 25 — three schools that have long fed Manhattan’s structured-finance desks. Georgetown, Harvard, Michigan, and George Washington fill out the rest, but the top three do most of the work.

On practice area, there’s no real contest. Capital Markets claims 112 partners, comfortably ahead of Banking & Finance at 71 and Corporate at 62. Real Estate’s 56 reflects how much CRE CLO activity drives this market, and the 49 in Litigation is a quiet reminder that distressed and defaulted deals eventually need someone to fight about them.

The Takeaway

The pattern is unmistakable: CLO bench strength belongs to the structured-finance specialists, the professional pipeline is anchored in a handful of New York schools, and the practice scope spans from standard issuance to the frontier of crypto-related insolvency analysis.

For those hiring, pitching, or tracking the market’s trajectory, this is the current landscape. The deepest teams aren’t always found where the traditional league tables suggest, and it’s in that divergence where the real opportunity is found.