The Mission: Submit all M&A transactions to Claire Poole. Every deal in Claire’s Corporate Deal Tracker Weekly Roundup is added to the M&A Master Chart. The CDT M&A Master Chart is always available for all Texas Lawbook subscribers to access and review.
The Result: Transparency. Increased deal reporting. More complete and detailed M&A data. The Corporate Deal Tracker is completely different data from Mergermarket.
The Reason: Every three months, The Texas Lawbook publishes articles about M&A trends in Texas, including the top law firms and lawyers doing those deals.
And each time, lawyers and law firm leaders call to state that their transactions may not have been included in our exclusive Corporate Deal Tracker. Many times, the deals are not there simply because no one told us about them.
The Lawbook is announcing a new process that makes it easier for lawyers and firms and makes the process completely transparent.
Today, The Lawbook introduces the Corporate Deal Tracker Master Chart for M&A. The CDT Master Chart will document the details of every non-confidential M&A transaction handled by lawyers in Texas.
As you can see for yourself, the Master Chart includes the names and locations of the buyer, seller and target, the names of the law firms representing these parties and their office location, the date of the deal announcement and the dollar value of the transaction. It also will show who the lead law firms and lawyers were.
Currently, we have all non-confidential transactions – 69 of them so far – on the Master Chart with a deal value of $500 million or more. We plan to update the Master Chart every week.
By Nov. 4, we plan to have all non-confidential transactions listed on the Master Chart for your inspection.
All of our articles and reports on Corporate Deal Tracker rankings will be based on the deals in the Master Chart.
Data for the Master Chart
How do deals get listed on the Master Chart?
The easiest and preferred process is that you submit your M&A transaction details to our senior M&A reporter Claire Poole. Claire has written about M&A in Texas for 18 years – for 16 years at The Deal and the past two years for The Texas Lawbook.
Every week, Claire writes her Corporate Deal Tracker Weekly Roundup, which documents all of the M&A transactions and securities offerings of the previous week. Claire’s weekly roundup is like the Book of Numbers in the Bible: She lists the details of each deal and the lawyers and investment bankers who were involved.
That same week, Texas Lawbook researcher Makenna Brooks takes all of the deals in Claire’s article and makes sure that they are properly added to the Corporate Deal Tracker Master Chart.
Claire and Makenna work with Texas Lawbook senior editor Allen Pusey, who oversees the CDT database. Allen, Claire and Makenna double-check the data for accuracy and holes.
Then, The Lawbook publishes the CDT M&A Master Chart for non-confidential deals.
Readers get to review the chart and alert Claire and Allen to transactions that are missing.
From that data, The Lawbook publishes various rankings, including the law firms and lawyers who lead the most deals.
Allen and Makenna are focused first on the non-confidential M&A transactions, which are deals in which the law firms disclose the buyers, sellers, business sector, date and value of the transaction, as well as the lawyers involved.
Once the CDT’s non-confidential M&A Master Chart is complete, The Lawbook team plans to focus on the CDT’s Securities Offerings Master Chart. The third database will be a master chart for confidential transactions.
For confidential deals (where one or both of the parties cannot be identified or because the lawyer is actually in witness protection), you may submit the transactions via our portal, which you can reach by clicking here.
CDT v. Mergermarket
Many lawyers confuse Corporate Deal Tracker data with Mergermarket data, and we understand why there is confusion.
The Texas Lawbook owns and operates the Corporate Deal Tracker, which documents every corporate transaction handled by lawyers who office in Texas. For the CDT, it does not matter that the parties to transactions (buyers, sellers and targets) are not headquartered in Texas.
The CDT’s exclusive objective is to track the work being done by Texas lawyers, even if the deals involve foreign entities.
By contrast, The Texas Lawbook has an exclusive partnership with the independent research firm Mergermarket regarding M&A activity involving Texas-based companies. Mergermarket tracks all deals involving Texas businesses as the buyer, seller or target. In many instances, the lawyers handling the transactions are not Texas lawyers.
When it comes to Mergermarket data, The Texas Lawbook can only publish information provided to us by Mergermarket. If transactions are not being included by Mergermarket, you need to contact Mergermarket.
One final note: The Lawbook is now sending readers a weekly recap email of all the corporate transactional articles we published that week. To sign up for this free email, just click here.