Plenty of dealmakers expect a boom in M&A activity next year, anticipating a business-friendly Trump administration will rekindle animal spirits.

That may mean private-equity firms will unload companies they've held for years. Traditionally, that means Big Law firms will have a flood of work.

But it may also mean less of a certain type of complex transaction that has been occurring over the past year: Private equity companies selling pieces of businesses between themselves.

On this episode of our podcast, On the Merits, Bloomberg Law’s Roy Strom spoke with Neil Barlow, a private equity partner at Clifford Chance, about what this environment could mean for Big Law's M&A fortunes.

The upshot is that lawyers could be trading more complex deals for a greater volume of them. Either way, the trends highlight how important the private equity business has become for global law firms' success.

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