Mergers and Acquisitions
Market-driven, practical advice to efficiently get your deals done
Capabilities at a glance
- Deep experience with privately held companies. Private equity has been a focus of our team for more than 30 years, while family-owned businesses are the traditional core of our mergers and acquisitions (M&A) practice. Additionally, we work on large corporate M&A and joint ventures.
- Practical approach to deals and a problem-solving mentality focused on finding paths forward. We offer real-world guidance on issues identified in diligence. Our attorneys are not M&A mercenaries; they live and breathe their areas of focus.
- The right-sized firm for the middle market. Our more than 45 dedicated M&A lawyers are complemented by hundreds of subject-matter professionals. We provide small deal teams and meaningful senior partner attention on all transactions.
- We provide efficiency, with deal teams and rate structures that provide excellent value. We provide day-to-day legal counsel to most of our clients, which allows us to better understand their business and structure efficient transactions.
Shared purpose with clients on mergers and acquisitions
We take pride in closing deals, not scoring legal points. Every transaction is different in terms of the personalities involved, the relative sophistication of buyers and sellers, and our client’s priorities. We work hard on the front end of a transaction to understand these variables and structure our approach to the deal in a manner best suited to achieving our client’s goals and closing the transaction. Our focus and experience in middle market M&A allows us to work well with counterparties of various levels of sophistication and deal experience, from some of the largest private equity funds in the world to entrepreneurial family-owned businesses with little to no prior M&A experience. Our mission is to be the first choice of sophisticated buyers and sellers seeking practical, market-driven legal advice.
Distinctive, substantial M&A experience
Our M&A team has substantial experience beyond what is common for most firms of similar size. Our decades-long focus on private equity has allowed us to build a sophisticated understanding of not only transactional legal terms, but also equity and debt structures, management and control rights, executive compensation and equity incentives, and portfolio development. We have extensive private equity experience in both platform transactions and add-on acquisitions and related equity and debt financing. We also have an even longer history of helping family-owned and other private businesses engage in strategic M&A, as well as succession planning and exit transactions.
We consider ourselves industry-agnostic in our M&A deals, but have significant recent experience in a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, health care and pharmaceuticals, consumer packaged goods, B2B and B2C services, food and beverage, transportation and logistics, and technology.
Successes
- Represented a private equity-backed B2B services company in more than 13 acquisitions over a two-year period, helping them consolidate a fragmented market and diversify their business operations.
- Represented a private equity-backed health care company in its first international acquisition to expand its product offerings and diversify its geographic footprint.
- Represented a founder-owned IT security training business in the sale of 100% of the equity of the business to a strategic acquirer.
- Represented a private equity firm in the acquisition of a consumer packaged goods company from its founder.
