Mills & Reeve’s corporate team in Birmingham has stormed the first half of 2015, advising on more than £3.4 billion worth of deals.
The performance won the firm top slot as the Birmingham-based law firm with the highest value of deals advised on in Experian’s ‘Deal Review and Advisor League Tables H1 2015’, published this week
In the six months from January to June the team advised on some of the region’s most high profile transactions, working across multiple jurisdictions.
Headline deals include advising 99p Stores on its proposed £55 million sale to Poundland and acting for Center Parcs UK, as part of a team of advisers, on its acquisition by US-based Brookfield Property Partners, funded by Blackstone.
The firm also advised Partnerships in Care, the NASDAQ-listed Acadia Healthcare owned specialist care provider on five separate business acquisitions in three separate jurisdictions. Also in the healthcare sector, the firm represented US-based Tenet Healthcare on its purchase of Aspen Healthcare for $215 million.
Peter McLintock, partner in Mills & Reeve’s corporate team in Birmingham, said: “The UK is leading the league table in terms of merger and acquisition deals, dwarfing those in the rest of Europe.
“This is proving a vintage era, with major strides being made to engineer growth through merger and acquisition.
“Advisers now need to be creative, imaginative and work collaboratively to make these projects happen. For instance, on the Poundland/99p attempted merger, we continue to explore novel competition law solutions with Magic Circle firm, Freshfields, representing both the buyer and seller groups, whilst on the Center Parcs sale, this was taken a step further where we joined forces with Freshfields again to provide the vendors with a one-stop affordable solution.”
