Mergers & Acquisitions

Our lawyers have vast experience in all aspects of mergers and acquisitions. We have been the lead advisor on acquisitions (shares, assets or hybrid), divestitures, joint ventures, leveraged and management buyouts, and plans of arrangement and amalgamations, often involving multiple jurisdictions.  Key to a successful merger or acquisition is the ability to field a team that can handle the multiple issues that arise in such a transaction, such as, corporate issues, tax issues, competition issues, intellectual property issues, employment issues and foreign investment issues. While led by our Business lawyers, our approach to mergers and acquisitions involves a closely integrated multi-disciplinary team of lawyers. An often significant part of a merger or acquisition is due diligence and our team has deployed numerous strategies to digest and advise on what can often be voluminous amount of due diligence materials in a timely and efficient manner.

Our clients include public and private companies of all sizes—local, national, multinational and cross border—engaged in wide range of industries, from financial services, technology and telecommunications to manufacturing, entertainment and real estate.

Some of the mergers and acquisitions on which we have provided lead counsel include:

• The $222.6 million sale of shares of a national radio broadcasting company;
• The $5.8-billion acquisition of a chain of grocery stores (named the Lexpert 2013 Deal of the Year);
• A REIT’s $990-million sale lease-back deal with a related holding company;
• The $1.8-billion acquisition by a North American department store of retail store leases in Atlantic Canada;
• The $170 million acquisition of several television channels, the $111 million acquisition of an entertainment company, and the $57 million purchase of an animation studio by a motion picture and video production company;
• A management-led buyout of the concrete division of a contracting company; and,
• The $4.6 million acquisition of a local analytics firm by an American firm providing criminal justice agencies with offender tracking and monitoring services, resulting in local expansion and new markets.