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 Posté le: Mer Aoû 07, 2013 2:22 pm Sujet du message: Vinson & |
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Burst of mergers and acquisitions keeps law firms busy
Click here to see the data on Houston-area law firms.Houston law firms marked up a lot of calendar dates last year with a big "M&A" written in green ink.Thanks to a recovering economy, favorable interest rates, concern about 2012 tax laws, and especially the booming domestic upstream oil and gas industry, legal firms in Houston and Texas handled near-record numbers of mergers and acquisitions. The Texas Lawbook reported 428 such deals for Texas corporations in 2012, including mergers, acquisitions, divestiture of assets,cheap motorcycle fairings, joint ventures and spinoffs.Among the firms enjoying this mergers and acquisitions gold rush was the company that tops the Chronicle's annual survey of the city's largest firms,motorcycle fairing, Vinson & Elkins, which was a big beneficiary of the healthy oil and gas industry."One of our strengths is obviously energy, and with commodity prices being where they are, expansion across the globe for energy-type projects, it's been incredibly frothy,aftermarket motorcycle fairings," Vinson & Elkins chairman Mark Kelly said.Another firm on the list, Latham & Watkins, ranked second to Vinson & Elkins in number of Texas deals, 40 to 65, but it registered the highest numbers in U.S. oil-and-gas-merger-and-acquisition deal values at $46.4 billion, according to Thomson Reuters."There is a huge increase in the amount of M&A activity going on," said Michael Dillard,motorcycle fairings, managing partner for Latham & Watkins' Houston office. "I think we've seen a trend over the last several years with the recovery slowly happening, but especially during 2012 and the beginning of 2013."Any increase in business is good news, but an increase like this is especially welcome for law firms. Mergers and acquisitions tend to be complicated and time-consuming, so they require more lawyers working longer. Kelly calls it "legal intensive.""It involves a lot of disciplines. When you are buying a company, you are going to bring in experts in the labor area and the environmental area, and a host of other kinds of expertise," he said.Of course, more important than the number of deals a firm does is the size of the deals. That's significant for firms in Houston, which Dillard called "really the center of the energy universe." The deals here can be huge."The energy and mining utilities were the second-largest sector by market share at 21.7 per- cent, with $90 billion worth of deals for the first quarter of 2012," Dillard said. "So it is a very large segment of the M&A market."A large factor is the great increase in domestic shale plays in oil or gas production, with many companies, domestic and foreign, trying to get in on the action. But other sectors besides energy are active in M&As right now."You can see that across the board," Kelly said. "Part of that is our low-interest-rate environment. It makes it much easier to do an M&A transaction, because you can leverage it. This year we just signed up the St. Luke's merger with the Catholic Health Initiative. That's not energy, but it's a big public trans- action. Good for our client, St. Luke's, and good for Houston."For the immediate future, both lawyers were confident the mergers and acquisition boom will keep delivering."I can tell you that without a doubt there will be more M&A activity," Dillard said. "What you are seeing now is more and more consolidation going on." |
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