Private Equity
A Trusted Leader in Private Equity Transactions
Fenwick's Private Equity practice combines a team of experienced private equity "purist" lawyers with the firm's more than 500 lawyers whose practice is dedicated to serving technology and life sciences clients in transformative transactions and day-to-day legal matters. This combination uniquely enables us to deliver the technical skills, experience and thought leadership earned through our disciplined focus in representing the world's most reputable technology companies over the last 50 years to complement the resources and expertise of our private equity transactional lawyers. As a result, we provide a holistic solution to the legal services needs of our private equity sponsor clients investing in the technology industry—without compromise and with maximum value.
While our private equity lawyers often represent sponsors investing across a wide spectrum of industries (including, among others, consumer, apparel, business services, healthcare services and manufacturing), our Private Equity practice is particularly distinguished by its expertise in representing sponsors in connection with technology transactions. We have substantial experience representing sponsors in transactions across various growth sectors within the broader technology industry, including, among other sectors, software (enterprise/consumer and SaaS/traditional licensing models), e-commerce, social media, networking and communications, gaming and Internet content.
We regularly represent private equity sponsors (including buyout funds, growth equity funds, venture capital funds and hedge funds) and the companies partnering with those sponsors in connection with buyouts, "going private" transactions, carve-out acquisitions, add-on acquisitions, divestitures, recapitalizations, growth equity/structured minority equity financings, debt financings, joint ventures and other strategic transactions.
We also deploy the broad resources of our firm—including patent and trademark prosecution, licensing, patent and commercial litigation, copyright, employment counseling and executive compensation lawyers, all of whom handle some of the most trusted assignments from many of the most prominent technology companies, to solve the day-to-day legal issues of the portfolio companies of our private equity sponsor clients.
More broadly, our M&A practice consistently earns accolades as a leader in technology M&A. Fenwick has been recognized as “Technology M&A Law Firm of the Year” for nine consecutive years by Global M&A Network and was ranked among the top 5 law firms for M&A by volume in the global TMT sector by GlobalData. As a result of our disciplined focus on the technology industry with a particular emphasis on strategic transactions, we are able to achieve the successes that are behind these accolades with less than one-third the number of lawyers of many firms within our peer group of competitors.
While our firm has a proven track record of representing parties to multi-billion dollar M&A transactions, our Private Equity practice is also routinely retained for its ability to deliver extraordinary value in "middle-market" private equity transactions.
Our Private Equity practice is supported by, among other disciplines, what has been recognized as one of the country's elite tax practices. Our award-winning Tax practice is widely known as a best-in-class international tax practice that operates within—and with the resources of—an Am Law 100 law firm to provide sophisticated, boutique-like tax counsel for our clients. All of Fenwick's tax partners have appeared in Euromoney’s widely respected “World’s Leading Tax Advisors.”
