A Lancashire family-owned care home group has been sold by its owners to a Greater Manchester-based healthcare services provider in a deal supported by Brabners.
Read moreMergers & Acquisitions
Our corporate transaction lawyers are experts in mergers and acquisitions. We provide support on the acquisition trail as you grow your business.
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Our corporate acquisitions team provides the guidance and efficiency you need throughout your growth journey
As one of the UK’s most active legal teams for merger and acquisition (M&A) activity according to Experian, we advised on £789m of deals across more than 190 transactions for a range of private companies and household names in 2023.
Our long and storied history of providing support to clients on the acquisition trail means that you can focus on what matters most while we drive the transactions through and deal with the detail.
Acquisitions — or ‘buy and build’ — can be a successful strategy for growth, helping your business to gain new customers, skills and technology, enter new markets or create valuable synergies. However, it can also prove expensive, time-consuming and distracting to complete due diligence, negotiate and close deals and subsequently integrate new businesses.
We advise many serial acquirers on all sizes of transaction and understand the complexities of corporate deals. Our approach is founded on collaboration, consistency, continuity of care and capacity. We excel at building trusted, long-term relationships and supporting your vision for both organic and acquisitive growth. And we minimise the attritional impact that transactions can have so that you can focus on your business and integration plans.
Experienced merger and acquisition lawyers
Our corporate team is one of the largest in the North, with over 50 legal experts (including 21 partners) and many specialists with experience across various sectors including technology, healthcare, manufacturing and supply chain, professional services, recruitment, construction, regeneration, retail, leisure and sport.
Our team includes highly experienced corporate lawyer Jon Close, who has a strong reputation for being user-friendly, straight-talking, pragmatic and solutions-driven in his deal approach.
He works alongside Rupert Gill, who has a significant track record in advising clients (both owner-managers and PLCs) on multiple acquisitions, including having undertaken every corporate acquisition for two separate clients over a 20+ year period. Recognised by The Legal 500 as a ‘Leading Individual’, Rupert is praised for his “great commercial expertise”.
Nicola Lomas provides specialist support for healthcare clients. Recognised nationally for handling a significant volume of dental practice sales and purchases, Nicola acts for a broad range of clients from small, part-time sole practitioners to large, multi-site corporate groups. She’s a ‘Next Generation Partner’ in The Legal 500.
Your trusted corporate transaction partners
Corporate transactions require the expertise of more than just corporate lawyers — and as a full-service law firm, we work collaboratively with a wide range of experts to ensure that you’re getting the right support for whatever you need, whether pre- or post-deal.
We know all too well the day-to-day difficulties you’ll face as well as the market pressures that impact on your business. Our innovative and user-friendly approach to corporate transactions will help to ensure that you meet your commercial, operational and strategic objectives as you grow through acquisitions.
We provide a seamless service through understanding and adopting the internal processes and procedures you currently have in place. This ensures consistency and continuity of care while identifying opportunities to add value and create efficiencies where possible.
Our transaction team will be handpicked based on your deal requirements — and throughout our relationship, we’ll provide efficient and proactive support, advice and commitment during all your transactions while working collaboratively with your own team and other advisers.
We have an impressive track record of supporting a large number of corporates with their acquisition strategies including NWF Group plc, Begbies Traynor Group plc, All About Children, Chase de Vere and James Hall & Co Ltd (SPAR).
Our approach to corporate acquisitions
At the outset of a transaction, we take the time to understand your business, the target business and its key stakeholders as well as your key deal priorities to tailor our approach accordingly and focus on what’s important to you.
Through our Deal Advisory team — a professional services team of specialist accountants who concentrate on proactively creating deals — we can even identify and make contact with your acquisition targets, taking the right steps for future growth while you focus on the day-job.
We will always provide you with a dedicated relationship manager to ensure consistency of approach and continuity of care. Our team will take care of the ‘leg work’ — efficiently managing acquisition trails that involve multiple transactions at any one time and alleviating the corresponding pressure on your management team.
By adopting tailored template documentation (such as heads of terms, legal due diligence questionnaires and reports and acquisition agreements) and a clear, consistent reporting style, we’ll align with your goals and provide clear ‘to-do’ lists to minimise your review time.
Our transaction summary reports will flag any key commercial changes from the heads of terms and material departures from template documents to keep you aware of the issues without having to read into the transaction documents. This will feed into any post-completion plan to help with the integration process, which we know is where the hard work really begins.
Underpinning our transactional and commercial expertise is the strength of our other teams that specialise in regulatory, employment, pensions, real estate, intellectual property, procurement and commercial contract matters.
Experts in large and international transactions
We provide leading legal solutions for expanding international businesses and often our larger or more complex transactions have an international angle. We regularly assist international clients looking to make acquisitions in the UK, as well as UK acquirers in their expansion plans abroad.
Our affiliations with leading law firm networks The Association of European Lawyers and Eurolegal provide access to expert legal advice in almost all jurisdictions.
Many of our larger transactions, especially those where the sellers include a private equity firm, involve warranty and indemnity insurance (W&I). This can help buyers to bridge the gap in contractual cover left when certain sellers, including private equity, are not able or willing to provide warranties and indemnities. Our buyer clients often look at W&I at the bid stage of a transaction as a tool to add weight to their bid.
Once identified as the preferred bidder, the buyer’s due diligence process will then help to inform the scope and extent of any W&I cover available in the market and in particular any specific exclusions to cover which will typically form the subject matter of specific indemnities or additional warranties to be negotiated with the sellers.
“I worked with Brabners for over 12 years to grow the nursery group All About Children through numerous acquisitions as well as the eventual sale of the group in 2022. Having a dedicated team at Brabners that understood the business’s commercial drivers made each acquisition efficient and smooth, which enabled rapid growth without significant disruption to the business. The continuity and service provided by the Brabners team allowed me to focus on running the business, which is key when on an acquisition trail. Simon Lewis in particular provided more than legal advice and became a trusted adviser to me personally.”
CEO, All About Children
“We've worked with the Brabners corporate team, led by Sam Mabon, for over ten years on all our acquisitions in that period. The team understands our sector and the regulatory landscape, which is invaluable to mitigate risk and maximise return on investment. The longstanding relationship means we know and trust that Brabners protects our interests while taking a commercial approach to negotiations. The team drives the transaction and ensures that it completes within the timeframe agreed.”
Legal & Regulatory Director, Chase de Vere
“NWF Group plc has worked with Rupert Gill and the wider team at Brabners for over 25 years now. During that time, Brabners has worked on circa 40 corporate transactions for us, sometimes several in any given year. The knowledge that the team has gained of our businesses and how we operate has helped smooth the acquisition process. Their use of standard documents and a reporting process that we know helps to reduce the management time involved on the legal aspects of the transactions.”
CEO, NWF Group plc
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