We'll Be Good, Promise - Companies Proposing Deals Allowed to Negotiate Behavior Fixes

M&A is booming. And in the Trump administration, as opposed to the Biden one, more of those deals might go through. 

See, there's been a shift from a fierce mindset of approaches such as:

Hey, this is a no-go

You'll have to divest your company of this and that unit

See you in court.

Those options were standard during the Biden administration when Lina Khan headed the FTC.

The shift has been to a spirit of collaboration, that is a willingness to negotiate terms and conditions, documents Bloomberg Law. Yeah, we can hammer things out. Promise you'll conduct yourself in this way when the deal is done and we're open to seeing things your way. Instead of having to sell off key pieces of your businesses we can decide together on what ways you'll change your behavior. Conduct yourself differently.

With negotiation the new way, antitrust lawyers are being brought into the M&A process from the get-go and probably will sit at the table throughout the dealmaking. That pro-active approach anticipates what could evolve into a dealbreaker and can be addressed before positions begin to harden.

That brings up the issue of what role antitrust lawyers have in a firm. Does that constitute an actual practice or is it folded into other corporate practices? Given the opportunities opened by this administration's shift clients would probably want to opt to hire a law firm with a strong antitrust practice. Not one which seems like a, oh yes, we can do that for you. In the back room we have this great antitrust expert.

Bloomberg Law notes that Paul, Weiss has a track record for taking antitrust seriously. In the firm, antitrust is a stand-alone practice in both litigation and transactional. Recently Paul, Weiss handled the deals for Charter Communications and Keurig Dr. Pepper. A major long-term client has been Apollo whose growth strategy includes plenty of M&A. 

Law firms lacking such a comprehensive structure could miss out on the surge in M&A business. 

Meanwhile, with more deals being approved there could be more reductions in force. Mergers create redundancies. The new entity, for example, only requires one investor relations department. After Omnicom's acquisition of Interpublic, Reddit contains postings on the manpower carnage.

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