Bloomberg’s “Global Legal Advisory Mergers & Acquisitions Ranking for 2009 Mid-Year” are out and they got it right.
Wachtell is #1.
Meanwhile, Reuters has their own methodology and ranks Wachtell at #6 – putting them in the camp of bad rankers with those morons at Corporate Board Member Magazine and FTI Consulting. We’re still pissed about that one. Not to mention those ridiculous bankruptcy rankings that had White & Case at #1 and Weil not even in the top 10.
Analysis after the jump.
It’s nice to see Wachtell back on top where they belong, but this has just been a miserable deal for years. According to Bloomberg, volume is off by 44% compared to last year, down to $759 billion. Thomson Reuters, meanwhile, says $941 billion worth of deals were done in the period.
One side effect of so few deals being done is that a handful of deals are skewing the rankings. Six of the top ten in the Bloomberg list have roles in Pfizer’s acquisition of Wyeth and four are working on the Schering-Plough acquisition by Merck.
Notice who’s missing from that list, though? Cadwalader, which is Pfizer’s deal counsel. The Pfizer deal counts for $64 billion by itself, so I suspect someone at Cadwalader’s PR group has fallen asleep at the switch. It’s pretty unlikely that the entire rest of the firm hasn’t done $9 billion worth of deals to make the rankings. More likely, they screwed up the submission. Or maybe it really is all the Dennis Block show these days. Anyone know?
League tables are always funny business. For example, on that Pfizer deal, Wachtell represents the target’s board (as usual) and gets full credit, but Simpson’s Casey Cogut was the lead deal lawyer on the sell side. That’s fine, but it’s when firms like Stikeman Elliott, Mallesons, and Allens Arthur get full credit that you have to scratch your head. They’re Canadian and Australian competition counsel on the deal. Clifford Chance (EU) and Morgan Lewis (US) are antitrust counsel. Meanwhile, DLA Piper gets no credit for being “due diligence counsel” for Pfizer.
Then, of course, there are the issues about which deals count for a period. Reuters obviously takes a broader view (although we’re still trying to figure out exactly what the agencies’ criteria are). It looks like Bloomberg probably isn’t including some things like the British government’s investments in Lloyd’s and RBS. If we’re going to go all bailout, then these lists are going to get messy in a hurry. Not to mention if all the bankruptcy sales are included.
Bloomberg Rankings
| Firm | Value of Deals (in billions) |
| Wachtell Lipton | $150.4 |
| Skadden Arps | $119.6 |
| Clifford Chance | $109.9 |
| Simpson Thacher | $107.8 |
| Mallesons | $94.2 |
| Linklaters | $92.6 |
| Blake Cassels | $83.5 |
| Stikeman Elliott | $81.0 |
| Cleary Gottlieb | $73.7 |
| Allens Arthur | $72.6 |
Reuters Rankings
| Firm | Value | Mkt. Shr. | No. Deals |
| Linklaters | $229.6 | 24.4 | 99 |
| Skadden, Arps | $192.9 | 20.5 | 68 |
| Freshfields | $191.8 | 20.4 | 104 |
| Allens Arthur Robinson | $183.8 | 19.5 | 27 |
| Sullivan & Cromwell | $150.9 | 16 | 40 |
| Wachtell Lipton | $146.6 | 15.6 | 25 |
| Simpson Thacher | $115.9 | 12.3 | 49 |
| Clifford Chance | $113.0 | 12 | 67 |
| Shearman & Sterling | $105.9 | 11.3 | 72 |
| Paul, Weiss | $97.2 | 10.3 | 24 |
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yeah, wtf are these other firms, stikeman, etc.