5 minute read • Updated 11 June 2026

Three of the world’s largest tech/AI companies have recently publicly confirmed who is running their IPOs. In each case, the winning firm was not the one with the most matters overall, which is usually a litigation specialist, but the one holding the financing rounds, M&A, and strategic corporate work. That is the signal that predicts issuer's counsel: the firm a company trusts with its most important transactions is the firm it trusts to take it public.

Gibson Dunn is SpaceX's confirmed issuer's counsel. It holds the two largest transactions in our matters dataset, the $1.25 trillion xAI acquisition and the $19 billion EchoStar spectrum deal. A capital markets partner already sat on the xAI matter, the clearest sign the firm was being lined up for the listing.

Anthropic confirmed Wilson Sonsini as issuer's counsel. Susman Godfrey and Arnold & Porter record more matters, but theirs is copyright litigation. Wilson Sonsini holds the corporate work, headlined by the multi-billion-dollar Amazon Web Services (AWS) deal. The right kind of work won the mandate, not the highest volume.

OpenAI split issuer's counsel between Cooley and Wachtell Lipton: Cooley runs the IPO mechanics, Wachtell the governance and public benefit corporation conversion. Keker, Van Nest leads on matter count, but that work is litigation. The mandate went to the firms holding the corporate and governance work, not the highest volume.

The five companies below are all expected to go public, several as soon as 2026 or 2027, with private valuations ranging up to $134 billion. They span data infrastructure (Databricks), payments (Stripe), design software (Canva), defense tech (Anduril), and enterprise AI (Cohere). None has yet named its IPO counsel. For each, the firm ranking by recorded matters points to the likely issuer’s counsel, with financing-side work signaling the underwriters’ counsel role.

Fenwick & West is the clear predicted issuer's counsel. It records 46 matters, more than every other firm combined, spanning every financing round through the $4 billion Series L and all significant M&A: the strongest issuer-counsel signal in the data.

Fenwick & West is again the predicted issuer's counsel. It holds 36 of Stripe's matters, the same embedded, full-service pattern it shows at Databricks.

Latham & Watkins is the predicted issuer's counsel: its eight matters span M&A, banking, and tax across the US and UK, the global platform an Australian company needs for a Nasdaq listing. Allens, Canva's Australian home counsel, is the natural local co-counsel.

Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt is the predicted issuer's counsel, holding 18 of 20 matters including every tracked financing round. As Canada's leading capital markets firm, it is embedded at every level of Cohere's legal function.

Gunderson Dettmer is the predicted issuer's counsel, holding the full spread of Anduril's pre-IPO groundwork. Cooley is the likely co-counsel: its capital markets credit on the $1.5 billion Series F is a direct IPO-preparation signal, and it is already confirmed on OpenAI.

An IPO is, at its core, a capital markets transaction, and lateral Partner hiring in the practice has not been steady.

Capital markets lateral moves at AM Law 200 firms globally fell to 99 in 2023, then rebounded +11% in 2024 and a further +25% in 2025, the strongest year in the period. That late surge, concentrated in the run-up to the current listings, is the clearest sign that firms are staffing up for the IPO wave.

Source: Publicly available data tracked by Pirical

Timeframe: Client matter data covering Jan 2021 to June 2026; lateral hire data covering May 2025 to May 2026.

Scope: Recorded legal matters for the eight companies analyzed (SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, Stripe, Canva, Cohere, and Anduril) across all firms and practice areas, and global capital markets lateral Partner moves at AM Law 200 firms. 

Caveat: Confirmed mandates are based on public reporting cross-referenced against the matter data; predicted mandates are derived from the depth, value, and type of recorded work and have not been announced. Data is derived from tracked client matters, lateral Partner moves, and public reporting; numbers may be slightly incomplete due to limited public information.

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Pirical Legal Professionals seamlessly aggregates data from a wide range of public sources: law firm websites, bar associations, legal news, deals publications, legal rankings, LinkedIn and more. Our coverage is global, in-depth and constantly refreshed.