Overview
Gunster lawyers have counseled clients on thousands of transactions involving billions of dollars, handling mergers and acquisitions of all sizes across numerous industries.
Ours is one of the few Florida-based M&A teams that offers national-caliber expertise and pedigree. We strive to deliver the experience, skill and sophistication of a large national firm and the senior attorney attention, client service, personal touch and value of a boutique firm.
Our Clients
Gunster’s M&A practice serves many types of clients, including private equity firms, business owners, founders, entrepreneurs, and public and private companies at all stages, from new and emerging enterprises to industry-leading companies and family-owned businesses. While we are Florida-focused, we handle transactions across the country.
As a full-service commercial law firm, we build cross-disciplinary teams based on our clients’ specific needs and goals, leveraging the experience of lawyers across our various practices and industry groups to support our clients on all aspects of their transactions.
Our Services
Clients rely on us at every stage of M&A transactions, from pre-transaction planning and due diligence through drafting and negotiating transaction documents, handling other critical items and getting deals done. We advise our clients on all aspects of transactions, including financing, equity documents, executive compensation and employee incentives. We also assist with post-closing integration. Handling both buy-side and sell-side deals, our M&A lawyers are particularly active in representing business owners in selling their companies, closing numerous significant, high-value transactions each year.
We focus on delivering practical solutions, minimizing disruption to our clients’ businesses and finding solutions to move deals forward, offering services that include:
- Mergers, acquisitions and sales of public and private companies, assets, equity interests and divisions
- Platform and add-on/bolt-on transactions by private equity firms and their portfolio companies
- Joint ventures and strategic alliances
- Leveraged recapitalizations and buyouts
- Carve-outs, divestitures and other exits
- Company investments and purchases and sales of controlling and minority interests
- Cross-border transactions, including regulatory, tax and structural considerations
- Corporate reorganizations, consolidations, restructurings and distressed company transactions
- Transactions between affiliated business entities, such as spin-offs/split-offs
Additionally, often we are called on to serve as Florida counsel for national and international law firms in connection with mergers, acquisitions and other complex business transactions.
Why Gunster
Our M&A Group offers the deal knowledge, sophistication, quality and service of M&A teams at the best-known national law firms. Many of our lawyers joined us from those firms, and we routinely work across the table from those firms on significant transactions. We take a proactive approach and offer pragmatic advice, working to close deals as quickly and efficiently as possible and with minimal drama while delivering top-quality work product and protecting our clients’ interests.
We are highly responsive, thoughtful about deal execution and creative in finding solutions to challenges to help keep transactions on track. Our lawyers strive to provide “white glove service” that enables our clients to focus on running their businesses and spend less time dealing with legal matters. To do this, we take the time to understand our clients’ businesses and objectives. Then, we customize our approach to reduce ramp-up time, streamline the transaction process and achieve those objectives.
Additionally, our team is experienced across a range of industries and market sectors, including highly regulated businesses such as healthcare (through our dedicated Healthcare Transactions practice) banking and financial services, energy, education, insurance, legal and life sciences. Our experience also spans handling deals involving companies in business services, consumer products and services, construction, franchising, hospitality, infrastructure (including ports, powerlines, pipelines and other major infrastructure), distribution and logistics, manufacturing, medical equipment, public utilities, real estate, restaurants, retail, sports and leisure, software as a service, technology, telecommunications, transportation (including smart highways) and waste management.
