It didn’t feel like it at the time, but 2025 turned out to be a blockbuster year for M&A lawyers in Texas. Put simply, there were more deals made for more money (lots more) than we anticipated.
According to data compiled by The Texas Lawbook‘s exclusive Corporate Deal Tracker, there were 1,713 unique M&A transactions in 2025 involving Texas-based lawyers, 30.8 percent higher than the 2024 deal count. Total deal values in 2025 reached $1.2 trillion, a 64.5 percent boost from the year prior.
And the increases were level: of the 24 quarters reported since 2020, the four quarters of 2025 rank as the top four in deal count, with three of those quarters ranking highest in deal value as well.
Q3 2025 ranked at the top of the Texas-related M&A chart in both deal count and aggregate deal value, with 469 deals valued at $392.7 billion. Q4 2025 ranked second in both, with 453 deals valued at $355.3 billion. Q1 2025 was the only quarter that could be considered a straggler, however remotely, ranking third in deal count (406) but twelfth in value ($168.7 billion) against the 23 other quarters.
The question is: Why?
More than a few of the major market anxieties of recent years continued through 2025. Inflation remained persistent, hovering at 3 percent. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates, but not until Q3. And, of course, there was — and still is — the policy of tariff diplomacy, which can undermine a company’s supply chain almost overnight.
According to the Volatility Index — an algorithm created by the Chicago Board of Exchange to track investor hedging against perceived market threats — market concern reached a three-year peak in April when the Trump Administration announced a wholesale implementation of tariffs.
Still, the M&A market, especially in Texas, thrived.
The rise in deal values may be easily explained: they were simply higher across the globe. Unleashed by an anticipated demand for AI and data centers, buyers were willing to pay more for power, energy and infrastructure development; big deals became megadeals. And in Texas, where energy is the lingua franca of M&A, there were 220 deals valued at $1 billion or more; and 23 of those were mega transactions of $10 billion or more.
Energy, in which we include power and utilities, ranked at the top of Texas-related business sectors with 497 unique transactions valued at more than $408 billion. But although those deals represented 29 percent of the Texas-related total and a full third of their value, neither figure represents a significant change in the proportion of Texas deals in recent years.
Energy is followed by Software/Data (141 deals at $180 billion), Manufacturing (110 deals at $139 billion) and HealthCare (100 deals at $38 billion).
What’s more confusing is that business sector categories are fusing faster than curry and Jamaican jerk chicken. Our list includes sectors that could be easily be elided, like Telecommunications (30 deals at $64 billion) and Technology (92 deals at $36 billion) or Banking/Finance (25 deals at $13.6 billion) and Financial Services (82 deals at $71.8 billion) or Pharmaceuticals (13 deals at $14.7 billion and biotechnology (14 deals at $10.5 billion).
ANNUAL CDT RANKINGS
Starting Thursday with a special newsletter and continuing in Sunday’s Corporate Deal Tracker newsletter, The Texas Lawbook unveils its overall annual M&A rankings: the firms, the lawyers and the deals that defined last year. We’ll look at overall Texas M&A law firm rankings, as well as the firms that led the most deals last year for a principal party (buyer, seller, target) from a Texas office. Then it’s onto the lawyer rankings themselves on Sunday: see the Texas lawyers who finished in the Top 25 and more for overall M&A and those who led the most deals for a principal party. The only way to get the full rankings dataset is through the CDT newsletter. Sign up for it here now.
The dramatic rise in Texas-related deal count is more elusive. One factor may be deal-reporting. Like any almost any other analytics provider, the Corporate Deal Tracker relies on law firms and their lawyers to report their deals. As the 2025 Texas Lawbook rankings will suggest, law firms with Texas offices are competing with each other as never before.
Which leads to what may be a more important factor: major national and global transactional firms have increased their footprint in Texas. With changes in the state’s corporate governance, the roll-out of new business courts and a major migration to Texas of scores of corporate headquarters, the state has become a client-rich target for some of the world’s largest firms.
Since the beginning of 2024, law firms with significant transactional practices — Paul Hastings, Weil Gotshal & Manges, Paul Weiss, King & Spalding, Troutman Pepper, Skadden, White & Case, Latham & Watkins to name a few — have announced new offices in Texas or an expansion of offices already here, including some very recently.
The point is that Texas may no longer be matching national trends in M&A; it could be surpassing them. A good year elsewhere was a great year in Texas, regardless of the small print. And there are simply more M&A deals at higher values than ever because there are more lawyers doing more deals from offices in Texas than ever before.