Thirty-four companies sold on full sell-side mandates since 2020. Here is exactly what that means.

Because sample definition is the thing that separates a datum from a boast, here is exactly what each number means – and what it does not.

Our client transactions are covered by confidentiality – deliberately, and it's the same discretion you'll want when it's your name on the teaser. What we publish here is what consent permits, dated and never extrapolated.

What we can add for any serious counterparty today: the prior-career transactions of each senior person, by name where public sources allow, and our process standard in writing – what you get in the first eight weeks. What we won't do is inflate. If the verified version isn't enough for your board, that's a legitimate conclusion – and we'd rather lose the mandate than win it with numbers we can't stand behind.

Every senior person here has built and sold a technology company – as founder, co-founder or operating principal, and each biography says which – and the same team has closed more than $40 billion of M&A and complex corporate transactions across prior careers inside global corporations and top-tier law firms. Along the way, that work built long-standing relationships with acquirers this team has represented as counsel and as advisers, and worked inside. Those relationships are part of what a mandate buys. The experience itself is attributed where it belongs – to the person, at the institution, in the role – on the People page, named where consent and public sources allow.

If you have sold a company before. You do not need an adviser to explain a letter of intent or a data room to you. The differences sit further inside the mandate: the partner who wins your business stays in the work; the valuation is built before market rather than in response to an offer; every priority buyer has a written decision thesis before contact; diligence is prepared before exclusivity rather than survived during it; and price and structure are negotiated together, while alternatives still exist. If your last adviser did all of that well, the question is only whether we can do it better for this company – and that is a short conversation. → People

Selected, by way of scale – from Travis Callahan's prior career: transactions negotiated and structured as Group VP & Senior Legal Counsel M&A inside ABB's ~$24B global acquisition programme – the programme whose largest transactions in those years were Baldor ($4.2B), Thomas & Betts ($3.9B) and Power-One ($1B), named here for the scale of the programme rather than as a claim to a role on each; and, at Bingham, as counsel and one of a team of five, the $19B Parmalat restructuring – Global and European Restructuring Deal of the Year (IFR 2005).