Corporate
What investment screening has done to cross-border deal timelines
Screening regimes rarely block transactions. They reprice them, by moving the critical path from negotiation to consent sequencing.
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Practice Area
We advise on transactions where the legal question and the commercial question are the same question — which is most of the transactions worth doing.
Practice contacts
Our corporate practice handles acquisitions and disposals, carve-outs of businesses that have never operated independently, joint ventures between parties who remain competitors, and the shareholder arrangements that govern privately held companies over decades.
Roughly two-thirds of the transactions we handle are cross-border. That is not a marketing claim about global reach; it is a statement about where the difficulty lies. A transaction spanning three jurisdictions is not three transactions. It is one transaction with three sets of consents, three regulators on different clocks, and one signing date, and the work is in the sequencing.
We are also willing to say when a deal should not be done in its current form. A partner who has never advised a client to walk away is not exercising judgment; they are processing instructions.
Capabilities
Public and private acquisitions and disposals, auctions, and negotiated transactions, from letter of intent through post-closing adjustment.
Separating a division that has shared systems, people, contracts, and premises with its parent — including the transitional arrangements that keep it operating on day one.
Governance, deadlock, funding obligations, and the exit mechanics that determine what happens when the parties' interests diverge.
Shareholders' agreements, board composition, reserved matters, and the constitutional documents of closely held and family-owned companies.
Preferred equity, convertible instruments, and negotiated minority positions, including the protective rights that make them investable.
The team
Representative Matters
A specialty materials division across nine countries, sold to a private capital buyer with sixty percent of its operations still running on the parent's systems.
A sponsor-led secondary in which the conflicts process was settled before the transaction was announced rather than defended after it.
Thirty-one shareholders, four of whom worked in the business, and a governing document written in 1974.
A departure that had to be announced, a covenant that had to be enforced, and a business that had to keep its clients through both.
Industries
Manufacturers, distributors, and consumer businesses, many of them family-controlled.
Providers, device manufacturers, and diagnostics businesses operating under clinical and commercial obligations at once.
Software, devices, and data businesses, and the older companies that have become them.
Generation, transmission, digital infrastructure, and the long-duration contracts behind them.
Speak to the firm
Describe the matter in general terms and name the parties involved. We run a conflicts check, usually within two business days, and a partner in the relevant practice will call you. The first conversation is not charged.