Yigal Arnon-Tadmor and Naschitz Brandes: The Quiet Power Players

Two firms that complete Israel's Big Six. Lower public profile. Top-tier practices. The institutional memory of a generation of Israeli deal-making.

Five of the six firms in Israel's legal oligopoly draw most of the attention.

Herzog by size. Meitar by tech-deal volume. Goldfarb by capital-markets scale. Gornitzky by its tax and litigation franchise. Arnon, Tadmor-Levy by the strength of its merged-firm M&A and disputes practice.

The sixth — Naschitz, Brandes, Amir — is the firm most foreign observers cannot place. That is precisely the point.

This piece closes the Big Six map with the two firms that fill it out.

Why It Matters

The two quietest firms in the Big Six carry a disproportionate share of long-relationship Israeli corporate work — institutional real estate, family-controlled industrial groups, major banking relationships, and infrastructure mandates. Foreign acquirers and partners frequently underestimate them. That is a procurement mistake with measurable cost on the most sensitive long-tail Israeli matters.

Arnon, Tadmor-Levy — The Merged Practice

In 2022, two historic Israeli firms — Yigal Arnon & Co. and Tadmor Levy & Co. — combined to form Arnon, Tadmor-Levy.

The merger was significant for the Israeli market. It produced a top-tier corporate and disputes platform with roots in two distinct traditions.

Yigal Arnon brought a long-standing reputation in M&A, hi-tech, capital markets, real estate, and intellectual property, with offices in both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Tadmor Levy brought a market-leading class-action defense practice and a strong commercial-disputes franchise.

The combined firm is now consistently top-ranked across cross-border M&A, capital markets, hi-tech, real estate, banking, and class actions. Its class-action defense group is among the most distinguished in the country. See: Aphek-Liebowitz and Israel's Securities Class-Action Machine.

The Real-Estate Franchise

Real estate is a category most foreign observers miss when describing the Israeli legal market.

It should not be missed. Israeli real estate generates one of the highest per-deal legal complexities in the developed world — driven by the Israel Land Authority's ownership of roughly 93% of the country's land, the leasehold structures that flow from it, and the planning, taxation, and litigation infrastructure layered on top.

Arnon, Tadmor-Levy is one of a small number of firms with a senior partner bench equipped to run institutional-grade real-estate transactions — including for foreign investors entering Israeli development, hotel, and infrastructure markets.

Its capital-markets practice complements that anchor with strong work on TASE-listed issuers and public-company corporate matters.

Naschitz, Brandes, Amir — The Full-Service Quiet Performer

Naschitz, Brandes, Amir is a full-service firm with a distinct profile inside the Big Six.

It tends to operate with less public-facing profile than its peers. Its commercial reflex is institutional, conservative, and long-relationship-driven. Many of its clients are not household names but are commercially important — the long-tail Israeli industrial, real-estate, banking, and family-controlled corporate clients that prefer counsel that does not court press.

Practice strengths include:

Corporate and M&A — domestic and cross-border, often on transactions involving Israeli family-controlled companies and long-term industrial assets.
International tax planning — a discipline where the firm has built one of the country's deeper benches.
Real estate and infrastructure — including significant work on Israeli infrastructure projects.
Banking and financial services — a long client relationship with several of Israel's largest financial institutions.

Naschitz Brandes is the firm a foreign investor most often discovers only after a deal closes — when the same firm appears on the other side of the next two transactions in the same sector.

What the Two Firms Share

Three features run across both.

Institutional memory. Both firms carry the deal precedents of a generation. On complex Israeli corporate or real-estate matters, that institutional memory is itself a commercial asset.

Conservative public posture. Neither firm courts external media at the level of, say, Herzog. That keeps their commercial profile relatively quiet — and explains why foreign business readers underestimate their share.

Cross-border integration. Both have built workable foreign-firm referral networks and have on-the-ground capacity to coordinate transactions across multiple jurisdictions. Neither is a domestic-only shop.

The Investor Layer

Three practical points.

First: the Big Six is not a four-firm market plus filler. All six firms have top-tier practices in their core categories. Treating two of them as second-class is a procurement error.

Second: real estate is a category where the difference between top-tier and second-tier counsel is unusually large. Israeli land law is structurally specific. Arnon, Tadmor-Levy and Naschitz Brandes both belong on the short list for institutional real-estate work.

Third: for sensitive long-relationship Israeli clients — family offices, industrial holding companies, banking groups — the quieter firms are often the incumbents. Foreign acquirers and partners who do not understand that frequently underestimate the resistance to change of long-standing legal relationships.

Israel's legal market is a six-firm market. Six firms — Herzog, Meitar, Goldfarb, Gornitzky, Arnon Tadmor-Levy, Naschitz Brandes — control most of the cross-border deal flow of one of the most globally exposed small economies in the world.

Olam has now mapped all six.

Next: a new series. Same operating thesis — large, economically important, structurally invisible — applied to the next layer of Israel's power map. See also: The Big Six.