Kirkland & Ellis tops M&A legal adviser rankings for first time
By Anirban Sen
NEW YORK (Reuters) — Kirkland & Ellis, the world's largest law firm by revenue, has for the first time ranked No. 1 in the league tables compiled by Dealogic and LSEG that track the volume of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) that are advised upon by lawyers.
Kirkland advised on transactions worth $406.4 billion globally in 2023, giving the firm a market share on that basis of roughly 13%, according to Dealogic.
Latham & Watkins and Sullivan & Cromwell ranked Nos. 2 and 3, respectively. Overall global M&A volumes came in at about $3.13 trillion, according to Dealogic.
Kirkland also topped the rankings for transactions in the U.S., the world's biggest M&A market.
«We have a very diverse practice by size of deal, by type of client, by industry, by geography, and that got borne out in our results this year,» said Sarkis Jebejian, an M&A partner at Kirkland. «We advised on much bigger deals but if you look at the $5 billion-to-$15 billion sweet spot, we had really strong market share — and that's what drove it.»
During the year, Kirkland advised on several large deals, including ONEOK (NYSE:OKE)'s $19 billion acquisition of Magellan Midstream (NYSE:MMP) Partners, GTCR's $11.7 billion purchase of a 55% stake in Fidelity National Information Services unit Worldpay, and CVS Health (NYSE:CVS)'s $10.6 billion takeover of Oak Street Health.
Over the past decade, Kirkland has strengthened its M&A and private equity advisory groups by hiring several top lawyers from rival law firms. Some of those key hires include Eric Schiele, a former partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore; David Klein, who joined Kirkland from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; and Edward Lee, a rainmaker who defected from Wachtell, Lipton,
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