news

News (w/e 12/19/25)

Lee McCabe

23 Dec 2025 — 1 min read

Law Firms and PE Eyes Converge on MSO Model, Carving Out Back-Office Capital

Private equity and litigation funders are circling U.S. law firms’ MSO (management services organization) structures as a new frontier for capital deployment. Under the MSO model, firms carve out non-legal operations (back-office, tech, billing) into investable entities that fall outside prohibitions on non-lawyer ownership. Investors now see law firms as asset classes — particularly personal-injury and consumer practices — and are exploring minority stakes in the MSOs. For PE, it’s not just legal services; it’s a structural bypass of traditional barriers and a test of how far capital can encroach on previously protected professional sectors. Link

Medline’s IPO Rockets 41% in Biggest PE-Backed Public Debut Since 2021

Medline Industries — majority-owned by Blackstone, Carlyle, and Hellman & Friedman — priced its IPO and then saw shares surge ~41% above the offer on day one, marking the largest PE-backed U.S. public debut since Rivian. The medical supply giant’s performance matters because exit velocity has been a choke point all year. This isn’t a venture tech story; it’s middle-aged, cash-flowing industrial healthcare going public with real earnings behind it. Sponsors may not have sold stock yet, but the valuation and liquidity signal shifts the narrative around IPO windows again. Link

Private Equity Forum Recaps a “Reset Year” in Capital Formation and Strategy

Across recent PE forums in New York and San Francisco, allocators and GPs described 2025 not as a rebound but a reset — one where liquidity is tighter, exits are slower, and structural discipline trumps growth fantasies. Conversations centered on secondaries dynamics, fundraising retooling, and a shift from growth-at-all-costs to precision deployment and value creation. The takeaway: the mindset in private equity is changing in real time, and what worked yesterday won’t be the playbook for 2026. Link

News (w/e 1/9/26)

Eir Partners Closes $1 Billion Fund Focused on Healthcare Technology Miami-based Eir Partners closed its third fund at $1 billion, blowing past its $800 million target in just a few months. The raise reinforces a clear LP preference: specialist healthcare investors with repeatable playbooks still get paid attention, even as

Deals (w/e 1/9/26)

Veritas Capital Buys Majority Stake in Global Healthcare ExchangeVeritas Capital is acquiring a majority stake in Global Healthcare Exchange (GHX), the healthcare supply-chain software platform used by hospitals and suppliers across the U.S. GHX sits in the unglamorous but essential plumbing of healthcare, where scale and data matter more

Private equity has quietly entered a new sport: competitive talent hoarding.

Every firm now appears to be stockpiling operators the way children collected Pokémon cards. Operating Partners, Senior Advisors, Venture Partners, EIRs—hand out a title, add them to a slide, declare victory. LPs love the imagery. It signals “capability.” It looks sophisticated. It gives the impression of a tightly coordinated

AI isn’t coming for middle management. It’s already rearranging the job description.

The layer of people whose primary function is aggregating information, writing summaries, building decks, and “managing up” is about to feel the shift first. Not because AI is more insightful than they are, but because it’s cheaper, faster, and doesn’t need three pre-meetings to prepare for the meeting.