The Corporate Deal Tracker is a database produced by The Texas Lawbook that collects information on M&A deals and capital markets offerings handled by Texas-based lawyers. This means the transaction must have either been led by a Texas-based lawyer or involved a significant contribution by a firm’s Texas-based lawyers.
The Lawbook analyzes the data reported to the Deal Tracker and publishes various in-depth reports. Those reports include not only rankings for Texas-based lawyers and their firms, but also analyses on the range and type of businesses that are paying for work by those lawyers.
How to submit
To submit a transaction to our database, please use our online form found here. Feel free to peruse the form to see the criteria or download a .pdf file here.
What we accept
Deals we accept as M&A transactions include:
• Mergers
• Acquisitions
• Divestitures
• Joint ventures
• Private equity/venture capital investments
Deals we accept as securities offerings include:
• IPOs
• Follow-on public offerings (equity or debt)
• Private equity stock offerings
• Private debt offerings
• Exchange offerings
• At-the-market offerings (or ATMs)
• (Note: we do not accept tender offerings)
The Lawbook produces a master list of the database each year. Therefore, no deal will be credited in more than one year. Deals can be designated for a particular year by the date of closing or the announcement date, but not in both. For example, for the 2019 master list, The Lawbook will not accept a firm submission deal that closed in 2019 but was announced in 2018. Thus, where both dates are available, the date of announcement will be presumed to be the preferred date.
Crediting methodology
Unlike other databases, the Corporate Deal Tracker collects information based on where the lawyer is located, not the company. This means that it doesn’t matter whether a Texas-based lawyer led a deal for a Houston company or a Chinese company; the lawyer and his or her law firm will still receive credit.
A law firm can received credit for a CDT transaction even if a deal was led by a firm’s non-Texas office, the firm will still receive credit if a Texas-based lawyer was on the deal team and played a significant role in the transaction.
Our submission form allows firms to designate one or two lead lawyers. It also allows a list of other team members. If a transaction is led by non-Texas lawyers, but in the opinion of the Corporate Deal Tracker there is significant deal-team participation by a firm’s Texas offices, the transaction may be counted toward the firm’s overall ranking.
We have recently changed our policy on the securities side after receiving strong feedback from readers advising us that it is widely discouraged from a regulatory standpoint for a law firm to have only one lead attorney listed on an S-1 filing.
We recognize that some M&A transactions require legal advisory roles beyond representing the buyer or seller – such as representing the financial advisor that advised the buyer or seller. Because of that, we will give a firm credit if they played a role in the deal beyond representing the buyer or seller, but the lead lawyer of the firm’s deal team will not receive credit on the individual lawyers’ chart.
Confidential Deals
On the M&A side, we will credit a law firm for up to 10 confidential deals per year, but only when other non-confidential information (i.e. business sector, deal value, lawyers involved) is disclosed.
Deals where the buyer and seller are disclosed, but the deal value is NOT disclosed will be counted in deal count statistics as long as the RANGE OF VALUE is disclosed (ABOVE $1 billion; $500 million to $999 million, etc.). That option is available in the Corporate Deal Tracker Portal described below.
Conversely, on the securities side, we do not accept confidential submissions. Our reasoning behind this is that about 99 percent of the time, the information identifying the company issuing its stock will be publicly available on an SEC document.
We realize that a large majority of all deals that occur involve privately-held companies. Therefore, we do not put a limit to the amount of submissions in which you can provide almost all the information we seek except the deal value. As noted in our survey, if you are unable to give us the deal’s value, you have the option of providing a dollar range that the deal best falls under.
For more information on Corporate Deal Tracker, please contact Natalie Posgate
