Mergers and Acquisitions and Private Equity

With a diverse practice, we represent purchasers and sellers, and couple deal experience with a focused legal project management process. This allows us to spend less time on process-related tasks and drafting, and more time focusing on the key issues for the deal.

No matter the size of the deal, clients can count on having skilled lawyers lead the team and see the deal through. Our lawyers represent many of the world’s most active companies in their M&A transactions, and we also work with closely held companies for whom an M&A transaction is not a frequent event.

We apply our business acumen from across the firm to M&A deals; in addition to knowledgeable deal lawyers, our deal teams include accomplished attorneys in tax, employee benefits, intellectual property, environmental, labor, and finance. Notably, we work with our IP attorneys to help plan, negotiate and consummate business considerations and asset transfers. We collaborate with clients and their accountants or other tax advisers to develop creative tax and capital structures.

We invest the time to understand the client’s specific objectives and priorities. Based on these goals, we collaborate with other key deal team members, such as accountants and investment bankers, to identify key structural and economic issues and deal terms. This allows us to be deal facilitators – as opposed to deal inhibitors – by focusing our negotiating efforts on specific issues that produce value for our clients.

We have significant experience on both sides of the deal table. Our experience has taught us that to provide savvy strategic and tactical counsel to both sellers and buyers, we need to understand how all types of buyers approach a sale (both in terms of valuation and deal terms), whether through a competitive auction process or a more limited process.

Our M&A transaction experience includes formulating, negotiating and implementing a wide range of acquisition transactions for buyers and sellers across many industries, including solicited and unsolicited transactions, going private transactions, stock-for-stock (and cash and stock combination) acquisitions, spin-off transactions and other divestitures, and acquisitions of majority and minority interests. We also have deep experience in joint venture transactions. We closely follow market trends on using representation and warranty insurance designed to provide sellers added value and cost-certainty.