As a law student at Columbia University, Sanjay Murti wasn’t familiar with the world of large law firms and didn’t see himself building a career in one of them, he said on this week’s Drinks With The Deal podcast. But in an interview for a summer position at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, a partner told Murti to think of BigLaw as a graduate school — a place to learn and develop skills. Murti, now an M&A partner at Freshfields US LLP, took that approach and immersed himself in the practice.

He became a partner at Cravath in 2022, which was, he said, “a culminating moment, but it was the first time where I sat down and said, this is going to be the next 30 years of my career. What does that look like, and what do I want out of it? I had spent so much time in the early part of my career thinking in one- or two-year increments, answering that question of whether I feel like I’m learning, and I hadn’t given a ton of thought to the long term.”

In that process, he said, “I thought about how much the industry has changed in the last 10 or 15 years. I was looking at firms that were skyrocketing up the M&A league tables and thinking, what are those firms doing now, and what does that change look like over the next five years and over the next 30 years? To me, it became clear that there’s this tremendous amount of disruption happening in the industry, and at the center of that are firms that have been quicker to adapt to what clients’ needs are.”

Listen to the podcast with Sanjay Murti below:

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