Two executive orders, signed 22 June 2026. Executive Order 14413, Ushering in the Next Frontier of Quantum Innovation, hands the White House science office 180 days to rewrite the National Quantum Strategy around a single word: commercialization. The Department of Energy has to deliver a machine that does real science by 2028. Executive Order 14412 is blunter. Federal agencies have to move their most sensitive systems onto post-quantum encryption by 31 December 2030 and onto post-quantum authentication by the end of 2031, with federal contractors on post-quantum standards by the end of 2030.

Revenue arrived first. Quantum companies cleared $1 billion combined in 2025, which had never happened before. McKinsey's Quantum Technology Monitor, out 28 April 2026, now puts the technology's potential value at $1.3 trillion to $2.7 trillion by 2035. Nvidia moved as well. Its NVQLink interconnect wires quantum processors into GPU supercomputers, and chief executive Jensen Huang called it "the Rosetta Stone connecting quantum and classical supercomputers".

Advising a trapped-ion company and advising a photonics company are not the same job. So the client search was built around nine hardware companies, sorted by the physics each one is pursuing.

Across those nine companies, and among publicly available matters, Pirical has 119 lawyer involvements on record, sitting with 22 firms. Three firms hold 77 of them. That is 65% of everything, taken by Paul, Weiss, Osler, and Cooley. Fourth place is Davis Polk, on six. Nineteen of the 22 firms hold six or fewer. The panel is small.

Global, top 10 firms of 22 with recorded work among publicly available matters. One involvement is one lawyer on one matter, so a nine-lawyer deal team counts nine times. Data as of August 2026.

A further 12 firms hold two involvements or fewer.

Osler's whole position rests on one deal. Xanadu's cross-border de-SPAC pulled in 25 Osler lawyers working out of four Canadian cities, across 13 practice areas. Tax and M&A, obviously. Also marketing and advertising, real estate, executive compensation, a labor and employment counsel, and two separate IP litigation partners. Eight of the 25 were partners. A 26th Osler lawyer sits on a separate Xanadu financing, which is why Exhibit 1 shows 26 against the client rather than 25.

Paul, Weiss followed a buyer instead. IonQ has been acquiring without much pause: Oxford Ionics at $1.075 billion, SkyWater Technology at $1.8 billion, then Capella Space, Skyloom Global, Vector Atomic, and Seed Innovations. Chelsea Darnell is the M&A partner on four of those at once. Jonathan Ashtor covers intellectual property across three, including the University of Chicago agreement. Add $3 billion of follow-on offerings and the ID Quantique stake, and 17 lawyers are working one client.

Cooley did the thing most firms could still copy. Its Infleqtion work starts at a $100 million Series C, with a defense partnership alongside it, and finishes at the Churchill Capital Corp X merger that took the company public. The IonQ work is not deal work at all. Kathleen Hartnett and Ryan Blair won an appeal in a securities fraud class action over the dMY Technology Group III disclosures, which the Fourth Circuit decided as Defeo v. IonQ in April 2025. Early-stage money on one side, shareholder defense on the other, three clients rather than one. Those relationships got built when nobody thought quantum was worth chasing.

Client relationships are the sharper measure. They are not the only one.

A second and wider search asked which partners anywhere in the database carry quantum experience, whatever the client. It found 374. That is the pool the next mandates get staffed from.

Exhibit 2. Partners with quantum experience, by firm

Global, top 11 firms by partner count. Partners only, and not limited to the nine companies, so counts are not comparable with Exhibit 1.

Those 11 firms hold 113 of the 374 between them. The rest scatter. Patent attorney shops with two or three, regional corporate teams that touched a single financing, litigators with one matter behind them. Nobody outside the top 11 has more than six.

Most of that experience got built from the other side of the table, which is how firms usually break into a sector. Kirkland's eight are on the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park in Chicago, acting for the development with PsiQuantum as anchor tenant. Six of them practice real estate. The other two practice energy and infrastructure regulation, and environment and project finance. Weil's 10 were selling Luminar Semiconductor to Quantum Computing Inc. Willkie sat on the SPAC side of the Infleqtion deal that Cooley ran for the company. Barnes & Thornburg has eight, level with Kirkland, and no recorded work with any of the nine hardware companies at all. None of it is a panel appointment. All of it is a decent pitch for one.

The strategy rewrite lands in December. Procurement comes after strategy. Right now 22 firms worldwide have a direct line to the companies that will be selling into it, and 374 partners have enough experience to argue for one. Both numbers move from here.