| Corporate Team of the Year |
 This award will go to the team that can demonstrate the most outstanding deal for corporate clients in 2008. Consideration will be given for mergers and acquisitions work, as well as disposals, joint ventures, restructuring and capital markets listings. The judges are also looking for evidence of a strong partnership between the firm’s corporate lawyers and the in-house client team they are working with.
Previous Winners
Linklaters goes into the history books as one of the few back-to-back winners of Legal Business Awards. The firm’s truly outstanding performance has made last year’s Corporate Team of the Year impossible to overlook. Clay’s energy and utilities team scored arguably the most significant instruction of the resurgent nuclear sector, advising longstanding client energy company Centrica on its joint venture with EDF for the development of a new power station in the UK. The landmark deal saw Centrica acquire a 20% stake in British Energy, which EDF had acquired for £2.3bn in January, while Centrica also agreed to sell its 51% stake in Belgian electricity supplier SPE for a cash price of E1.3bn.  The funds for the EDF deal were raised through a complex £2.2bn ‘cash box’ issue – the only rights issue to finance an acquisition in the second half of 2008. It included a Rule 144a offering to US institutional investors, while the prospectus was ‘passported’ into France, Italy, Ireland, Germany and Spain. It’s a market that Linklaters truly dominated in 2009. Alongside Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, the firm acted on almost every major rights issue of 2009, including Lloyds Banking Group (£13.5bn), HSBC (£12.5bn) and Rio Tinto ($15.2bn). HIGHLY COMMENDEDFRESHFIELDS BRUCKHAUS DERINGERJulian Makin; Don GuineyFreshfields further reinforced its position as one of the market’s leading ECM teams with an instruction to advise the underwriters on the record-breaking £13.5bn rights issue of Lloyds Banking Group – the largest rights issue ever. The firm also matched Linklaters with roles on the majority of the year’s highest value rights issues, including those by Wolseley, Xstrata and National Express Group. LOVELLSNigel Read; Nicola EvansLovells landed a truly landmark deal for the real estate sector, advising SEGRO on the £1bn purchase of its biggest rival, Brixton. Not only was it one of the largest completed UK public takeovers of 2009, it was also the UK’s first REIT-to-REIT acquisition. It included a simultaneous £250m placing and open offer to raise capital, and required creative solutions to deal with Brixton’s high level of existing debt. NORTON ROSEMartin ScottNorton Rose won plaudits across the City for its instruction to advise key client HSBC on its £12.5bn rights issue – at the time the largest ever by a UK company. The firm used a multijurisdictional team comprising lawyers in London, Hong Kong, Paris, Amsterdam, Athens, Dubai, Frankfurt, Riyadh and Shanghai. SKADDEN, ARPS, SLATE, MEAGHER & FLOMMichael HatchardHatchard’s team demonstrated great skill and creativity in guiding Validus Holdings through one of the year’s few hostile takeovers. With target IPC Holdings restricted by a previous agreement with Max Capital Group, the firm arranged a proxy contest for IPC shareholders to vote against the Max transaction at the company’s annual general meeting. It even launched an audacious bid to have a hostile scheme of arrangement approved by the Supreme Court of Bermuda. SLAUGHTER AND MAYDavid Johnson; Simon NichollsSlaughters’ powerhouse corporate team landed yet another hugely important mandate to advise GlaxoSmithKline on its agreement with Pfizer to create HIV medicine company ViiV Healthcare. The firm implemented an innovative adjustable equity structure, allowing each company’s stakes to fluctuate based on the performance of their individual products and for preferential dividends to be paid if sales thresholds for those products are hit. Award sponsored by Hughes-Castell |