Forum Spotlight: Perkins Coie

[Jessica U]

Hi everyone,

I’m delighted to share that Perkins Coie has just announced its new LBA programme.

The programme is open to graduates, with applications closing on 2 January 2026. You can apply here.

To mark the launch, we’ll be featuring Perkins Coie in the forum this month. Use this thread to find out more about the firm and what sets Perkins Coie apart.

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What Makes Perkins Coie Different from Other Law Firms?

For more than a century, Perkins Coie have ‘been along for the journey’ and has grown alongside the world’s most ambitious technology companies, moving with founders from garage to IPO and embedding itself into the heart of the US innovation economy. This culture is rooted in the firm’s Pacific Northwest heritage, home to some of the most innovative companies in the world. While other firms retrofit “innovation” into legacy City or Wall Street structures, Perkins Coie was born inside the technology ecosystem and optimised around it.

This global identity forms the narrative that the London office scales into Europe: a firm defined by Counsel to Tomorrow, built on a culture where hierarchy is thin, information flows quickly, and teams prioritise technical depth, commercial clarity, and operator-level thinking. Internally, Perkins Coie invests heavily in legal operations, AI-enabled workflows, and data-driven coordination across practices. The firm also lives by its values, embedding them into training, leadership, and day-to-day decision-making. The result is consistent Cx: client experience designed for companies who expect counsel to move as fast, or even faster, than they do.

The London office mirrors the firm’s US strengths: deep exposure to high-growth tech, private capital, and institutional technology mandates. The office advises clients who scale aggressively, face complex regulatory change, and require counsel who reduce friction, not add to it. Its teams operate across borders without the inefficiency of mega-firm politics, giving clients fast, integrated, conflict-light solutions.

London takes that global DNA and sharpens it. From day one, London adopted a startup culture: a flat hierarchy, agile roles, and a refusal to replicate the slow, layered structures that dominate Big Law. Every person operates with ownership. Partners collaborate without silos. Associates are trained to become ‘partners in disguise’ early. And uniquely, London built the Legal Business Analyst Programme, which has now become the core expression of London’s differentiation and the most authentic embodiment of its Tx: talent experience.

The LBA Programme offers holistic training across business professional and legal professional seats and looks to shorten the traditional trainee pathway by blending full-time work and continuous learning, allowing second year LBAs to study for the SQE and avoid the need to take out additional debt during their study period.

LBAs are commercially aware, tech-enabled, and embedded in the business from day one. Training goes beyond legal skills: LBAs receive structured development across EQ, SQ, and IQ, producing lawyers who can operate with emotional intelligence, strategic capability, and analytical depth.

LBAs rotate across legal, finance, BD, marketing, regulatory, and operations, giving them a birds-eye view of how a high-growth office actually runs. The programme has a strong social-mobility focus, supported by initiatives such as the Welcome to London grant and the partnership with Zero Gravity. They work and earn while studying, avoiding the debt and disconnect of the legacy trainee model. By qualification, they have already spent years delivering value directly to partners and clients. These future associates are what the office describes as triple-threats; well-networked, fast-moving and fluent in the business of law. Perkins Coie London is like the firm’s innovation lab, with innovative winning outcomes are backed by a simple formula ‘Tx + Cx = a winning culture that sustains profitability’, a place that nurtures the Counsel to Tomorrow.

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If you’d like to see more posts about Perkins Coie like this, be sure to check this thread throughout the week!

 

[Jessica U]

Growth Capital to Private Equity: One Full Picture or Two Parallel Worlds?​

People often talk about growth capital and private equity as if they sit on a single spectrum. They don’t. They are two parallel worlds that occasionally touch but fundamentally run on different logic, incentives, and expectations.

Growth capital is about speed. Investors are backing momentum, not certainty. They want companies still expanding fast, grabbing market share, and building products that can reshape categories. They accept volatility. They accept imperfect data. What they care about is direction of travel. Their influence is strategic rather than hands-on: sharpen the go-to-market plan, tune the product roadmap, help hire senior operators, and keep the company pointed towards growth. They price tomorrow, not today.

Private equity is about control. PE wants businesses that already work: stable revenue, solid margins, and the ability to generate cash on schedule. They buy what exists, not what might exist. Their method is operational engineering: restructure teams, change incentives, introduce new reporting disciplines, optimise costs, and bolt on acquisitions to drive efficiencies. Leverage is a key tool. Predictability is the currency. They price the tangible, not the aspirational.

The difference shows up immediately in how deals are negotiated. Growth capital argues about valuation, runway, burn, forward projections, and momentum. PE argues about covenants, control rights, cashflow reliability, and exit planning. One funds ambition; the other funds execution. One bets on acceleration; the other bets on discipline.

Still, the worlds are not sealed off from each other. Market conditions over the last few years have created a narrow bridge between them. Higher rates, tighter liquidity, and the end of the hyper-growth era have pushed later-stage venture investors to behave more like private equity, at least at the edges. They scrutinise unit economics harder. They demand realistic paths to profitability. They intervene more aggressively on governance. Structured rounds, performance-linked tranches, and quasi-debt mechanisms have become far more common. Venture debt is no longer an optional extra; for many companies, it is an essential part of the capital stack.

This shift has sparked the claim that “VC is becoming PE”. It sounds compelling, but it’s only partially true. Venture capital has absorbed some private-equity discipline because the market forced it to. But structurally, it hasn’t crossed the line. VC funds still take minority stakes. They still rely on asymmetric upside. They still expect founders, not investors, to drive the company. They still operate in a world where potential is the core asset. Without control and without leverage, you cannot run a true PE playbook. The DNA remains different.

The real picture is simpler and sharper than the popular narrative. Growth capital and private equity are not one journey with different mile markers. They are two independent systems with a narrow overlap zone. Growth capital is velocity; private equity is control. Venture has become stricter, tougher, and more disciplined but it has not become private equity.

Founders who understand this distinction avoid mismatched investors, negotiate better terms, and maintain clarity about what each type of capital really demands.

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If you’d like to see more posts about Perkins Coie like this, be sure to check this thread next week!

 

[Jessica U]

Why the World’s Largest Tech Companies Choose Perkins Coie​

The world’s largest technology companies choose Perkins Coie because the firm is engineered for high-growth tech from the ground up. Its advantage comes from a century of taking major founders from first concept through the garage stage, into IPO, and then through global scale. Those clients are still with the firm today. Few firms can say that no company ever outgrows them. Perkins Coie can because they cover the entire technology lifecycle and the full ecosystem around it.

This end-to-end model is embedded into the firm's practice architecture. Perkins Coie acts for companies at incorporation, early-stage venture, Series A through D, growth capital, and private equity buyouts. They advise on M&A exits, public listings, and then support the company long after floating through their institutional tech practice: antitrust, privacy, IP, cybersecurity, litigation, emerging regulation, platform governance, and integrated digital compliance. This continuity gives global tech companies a full-service platform built for technology clients, able to stay with them through every stage of growth, from formation to IPO and beyond, with the confidence that they will never outgrow them.

Technical depth is the first structural advantage. Perkins Coie has been embedded in the sectors now defining global technology, AI, cloud, hardware, data infrastructure, emerging platforms, fintech, content governance, gaming, cybersecurity, and digital assets, for decades. The firm enters matters with institutional knowledge accumulated from thousands of similar investigations, launches, incidents, and regulatory cycles. They are not learning in parallel with clients; they arrive already steeped in the patterns.

Regulatory clarity is the second advantage. Big tech faces simultaneous pressure from antitrust authorities, privacy regulators, financial supervisors, export-control frameworks, and national-security bodies. Perkins Coie treats these not as isolated regimes but as an interlocking system. They map cross-border risk, anticipate regulatory behaviour, and design frameworks that are both defensible and operationally realistic.

Large technology companies operate at a scale where issues cascade: platform misuse, data events, litigation threats, compliance failures, geopolitical friction. Perkins Coie has rapid-response infrastructure, investigations teams, legal operations capability, and multi-disciplinary task forces, that allow the firm to intervene quickly and stabilise risk.

The firm also operates as a single coordinated organism across the US, UK, EU, and Asia, avoiding the fragmentation of traditional mega-firms.

London extends this platform into Europe with a distinct identity. The office runs on startup principles, flat structure, speed, accountability, with a clear framework which complements both talent and client experience. London’s slogan, Counsel to Tomorrow, reflects how they deliver the firm’s narrative and tech capability with European proximity and agility. Their London practice is built around three groups; Growth Tech, Private Capital, and Institutional Tech. Together, they cover the entire lifecycle of a technology company. This brings the best of Perkins Coie’s US experience into Europe, the same end-to-end journey the firm has delivered for decades: the American Dream, built for founders, investors and the companies of tomorrow.

The world’s largest technology companies choose Perkins Coie because no firm is built more completely for their lifecycle, scale, and pace.