A&O Shearman - Playbook (Winter Vacation Scheme 2026)

Are you applying for an A&O Shearman Vacation Scheme?

Here's all the research you need to impress.

This Playbook covers:

🧠 Practice Area Strategy
🏢 Why did AO Shearman open in Chicago?
📈 Flat revenue, profits up 14%: what that actually tells you
❗ Top challenges and opportunities
🔍 How to Stand Out

Plus how to use this information to stand out in your video questions and interviews!

⏱️ Deadline: 7 September

A&O Shearman's US Bet

What's going on?

• The merger's core rationale was cracking the US market, and the evidence is genuinely mixed.
• On the positive side, the US hiring has been very focused: private equity and M&A partners in Los Angeles, Austin and Chicago (including Germaine Gurr from Sidley Austin in February 2025 and Val Bleicher from Kirkland & Ellis), fund finance and capital markets in New York, and energy finance in Houston.
• April 2025: opened a Chicago office, its tenth in the US, with two energy-transition partners from Mayer Brown. It made 24 lateral hires in total in FY2026.
• On the less positive side: more than 170 legacy partners have left or retired since the merger was announced in May 2023, with more than a third of those exits in the US, and 130 gone since go-live in May 2024.
• 15 September 2025: the most damaging exit. David Higbee, global head of antitrust, executive committee member and a former chief of staff and deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ's antitrust division, left Washington DC for Paul Weiss, taking partners Ben Gris and Djordje Petkoski with him.

What's the signal?

This is a firm buying and losing US talent at the same time. The strategy is coherent (concentrate on high-value US corporate, PE, energy and disputes work) but execution is fragile: you cannot build a US private capital powerhouse to rival Kirkland and Latham while your antitrust head and your life-sciences and privacy partners are leaving for those very rivals.

The US strategy is a work in progress with real momentum in energy and private capital but a genuine retention problem, and because the firm does not disclose US-specific revenue, "is it working?" currently rests on hires, exits and commentary rather than hard US financials.

How to use this in your application and interview