Business Law: Mergers & Acquisitions

The Mergers & Acquisitions team at Downs Rachlin Martin PLLC represents large and small businesses in mergers and sales transactions. We offer extensive experience handling tax-free and taxable acquisitions and sales of stock or assets, mergers, management buyouts, recapitalizations and reorganizations to our clients.

When faced with a time-sensitive opportunity or need to rapidly expand your business through a merger or acquisition, you need an agile, responsive legal team to guide the process.

Our Mergers & Acquisitions team has a long history of successfully assisting clients with both straightforward and highly complex mergers and sales transactions. The key factors contributing to our success on behalf of clients include:

• Ensuring that our entire team understands the "big picture" - the intricacies of the business deal as well as our client's objectives.
• Using state-of-the-art technology to improve efficiency and communication. We collect, store and present data in a way that is accessible and useful to the client. When a project warrants it, we establish virtual private networks with the client.
• Assembling the right team. As one of the region’s largest law firms, we draw from a talented group of attorneys who are experienced in a wide range of transactions. We have a dedicated, trained team of paralegals who are adept at performing data extraction and manipulation processes. We have developed relationships with local counsel throughout the country, and we are accustomed to working with a client's other advisors.
• Being responsive and highly mobile; acting quickly.
• Providing an excellent value to our clients. By combining the rate structure of a mid-sized, Vermont- and New Hampshire-based law firm with reliance on trained paraprofessionals for significant parts of a project, we can achieve significant cost savings for our clients.

Working closely with the Tax Group, the Intellectual Property Group and other relevant areas of the firm's sophisticated legal practice, the Mergers & Acquisitions team offers the experience and resources needed to exceed client expectations.

Our recent transactional work includes:

• Represented a significant Vermont-based fabricator and manufacturer in its sale of assets to a private equity group.
• Assisted a Vermont-based outdoor products company in its acquisition of the brands, intellectual property and certain tangible assets of a manufacturer of mountaineering products based in the western United States, which resulted in a significant boost to the client’s brand portfolio.
• Represented a pet products business that had a nationwide customer base in a sale of assets, resulting in a liquidity event for the equity owners; negotiated incentive packages for key executives who assumed senior positions with the acquiring company.
• Served as Vermont counsel to a publicly traded company with a leading position in the health care software field in its merger with a multinational corporation.
• Served as Vermont counsel to the acquirer of a publicly traded energy supply company; represented the client in arranging for issuance of debt securities to fund the acquisition.
• Represented an international group of investors in its purchase of an equity interest in a company that has developed and patented innovations in the neuroscience field.
• Represented a New York-based niche software vendor in the sale of assets to a competing business; provided post-closing assistance to the client to enforce contractual obligations of the purchaser.
• Organized a team of professionals to perform due diligence for a market-leading telecommunications infrastructure company in its contemplated acquisition of assets that are situated throughout the country.

Contact Us

To learn more about our Mergers & Acquisitions practice, contact David Sylvester or Jake Wheeler.