Milbank LLP partners John Franchini and Neal Katyal have been named finalists for The American Lawyer Industry Awards. The annual awards highlight the legal industry’s most impactful and important work of the past year and beyond.
John Franchini, who co-leads Milbank’s Global Infrastructure practice, was named a finalist in the “Best Law Firm Corporate Lawyers of the Year: M&A and Private Equity” category. Neal Katyal, who leads Milbank’s Supreme Court and Appellate practice, was named a finalist in the “Litigator of the Year” category.
John has extensive experience representing global infrastructure, sovereign wealth, private equity, and pension funds, together with their portfolio companies, in investment, acquisition, recapitalization, disposition and strategic joint venture transactions. He has significant transactional experience involving core and non-core infrastructure assets; digital infrastructure assets (including data centers, fiber and tower assets); power generation (including conventional, utility scale renewables and other energy transition matters); midstream oil and gas assets; and transmission assets. He also has significant experience with regulated and non-regulated utilities. John was at the forefront of the development of insurance capital-backed JV transactions and has led numerous transactions deploying billions of dollars to strategic partners for capital expansion projects, including Sempra’s $15 billion Port Arthur LNG II on behalf of Blackstone Credit, Apollo, KKR and Goldman. John is the leading advisor on a multitude of sell-side transactions for consortiums involving strategic global infrastructure assets, exemplified by his recent role representing the five co-owners of the Colonial Pipeline in its historic $9.1 billion sale to Brookfield Infrastructure. In response to the rise in data center development and financings, John led the development of a first-of-its-kind structure featuring a stabilized data center platform and continues to lead on structuring liquidity options for the data center industry. In a period defined by seismic shifts across energy, infrastructure and digital markets, John has led many of the most consequential transactions for marquee clients and assets. He was named “Energy M&A Lawyer of the Year, North America” in 2025 by IJGlobal Investor.
Neal, a former Acting Solicitor General of the United States, focuses on appellate and complex litigation, with extensive experience in all sorts of matters of federal and state law. He is one of a few living individuals to have argued more than 50 cases before the Supreme Court of the United States and recently secured a landmark victory in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump. In a 6–3 decision that The New York Times described as “the most important Supreme Court decision this century,” the Court held that the president lacked authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to unilaterally impose sweeping tariffs without clear congressional authorization, striking down the tariff regime and reaffirming constitutional limits on executive power. Neal has been named “Litigator of the Year” twice before – in 2017, a year in which he argued seven cases at the Supreme Court, including Bristol Myers Squibb v. Superior Court, a landmark victory for personal jurisdiction law, and again in 2023, following the 2022-23 Supreme Court term in which he argued nearly 10% of the docket, including successfully winning Moore v. Harper, which Judge Michael Luttig described as “the most important case for American democracy in the almost two and a half centuries since America’s founding.”
