Hogan Lovells Events | December 2023

Silicon Valley M&A Forum

We’re back by popular demand! Our first post-pandemic M&A Forum took place on 12 December.

The Silicon Valley M&A Forums have been organized and run by leading Silicon Valley M&A partners Rick Climan, Jane Ross and Keith Flaum for over two decades. They are held over lunch (from noon to 2pm) in the main ballroom of the Four Seasons Hotel in Palo Alto. The 2024 schedule will be announced shortly. Topics regularly discussed at the Forums include:

A bulge bracket investment banker’s perspective on the current state of the M&A marketplace
Recent judicial and legislative developments of interest to M&A professionals
Recent antitrust, CFIUS and other regulatory developments
Negotiating controversial provisions in the acquisition agreement (often illustrated through animated negotiating cartoons)
Deal point studies – their uses and limitations, and the latest deal point statistics
M&A and the media
Women in M&A

Our M&A Forums are invitation-only events, attended primarily by in-house general counsel and transactional lawyers; corporate executives; corporate development professionals; investment bankers and other M&A professionals; corporate law professors and lecturers; deal reporters from major news outlets; and first-year law school students potentially interested in exploring a career in M&A. Interested in being added to our invitation list? Click here.

For the full agenda for our 12 December 2023 Silicon Valley M&A Forum, click here.

Our Silicon Valley M&A Forum returned to the Four Seasons Hotel in Palo Alto on 12 December, before a large, enthusiastic, standing room-only audience. The event was broadcast live nationally to ten of our locations across the country.

Key takeaways from our distinguished speakers at our December M&A Forum:

“Clearly, macro and geopolitical headwinds persisted throughout 2023 resulting in a challenging M&A environment. However, improving equity markets, strong corporate balance sheets and deep pools of private capital, combined with accelerating fundamentals and meaningful pent-up demand, should lead to a more robust tech M&A environment in 2024.” – Jack MacDonald, Partner, Centerview Partners

M&A Forum, Partner Jack MacDonald, Centerview Partners

“Over the past few years, the U.S. antitrust authorities have been aggressively attacking proposed mergers that they would probably not have challenged over the previous 40 years. But they’ve lost most of their recent court challenges, and now they are trying to change the rules of the game.” – Logan Breed, partner

“The Biden administration’s coming outbound investment program, described in a recent Executive Order, is aimed at preventing Americans from bankrolling the Chinese military industrial complex.” – Brian Curran, partner

“Determining what M&A deal terms are ‘market’ is a challenging endeavor. M&A deal point studies that take a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach and treat the entire strategic M&A deal marketplace as if it were one, singular market have little credibility in deal negotiations. Deal point studies that focus on ‘Buyer Power Ratio,’ distinguishing between M&A markets based on the relative size of the parties, are much more useful in the negotiation of any particular M&A transaction.” – Keith Flaum, partner

“In her HHolding decision earlier this year, Delaware Chancellor McCormack gave effect to a ‘hair trigger’ walk right in a business acquisition agreement. The language in the agreement gave the buyer the right to terminate the deal if the target company’s capitalization representation was inaccurate in any respect, even a trivial respect. The Chancellor interpreted the words in the agreement exactly as written and refused to imply a materiality requirement for the inaccuracy, thus allowing the buyer to terminate the deal because of a relatively insignificant inaccuracy.” – Jane Ross, partner

“A survey recently conducted by the Women in M&A Subcommittee of the ABA’s M&A Committee showed that the percentage of BigLaw M&A lawyers that are women was is 36%, up from 32% in the prior survey.” – Jennifer Muller, Houlihan Lokey, founding co-chair of the Women in M&A Subcommittee of the ABA’s M&A Committee