Ropes & Gray Named One of Law360’s Top Five Private Equity Groups of the Year

Law360, the online outlet for legal news and analysis, has named Ropes & Gray’s private equity group Practice of the Year for 2011 based on the firm’s work on a number of deals.

The practice group helped its clients “navigate 2011’s tricky waters of private equity financing and transactions,” Law360 wrote.

Among the cases Law360 cited were Ropes & Gray’s representation of:

• TPG in a deal with J.Crew when 75 percent of J.Crew shareholders voted in favor of a deal in which TPG and Leonard Green & Partners LP would pay $43.50 per share for J.Crew’s outstanding common stock
• The Blackstone Group in its $3 billion acquisition of Emdeon Inc., a Tennessee-based health care information technology company.
• Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners in the sale of music recording company Warner Music Group Inc. for $3.3 billion.

Commenting on the practice’s growth outside of the United States, the firm’s Strategic Development partner Newcomb Stillwell said, “If you dial back five years ago, people would have recognized us as a premier private equity firm in the states but either not present or pretty weakly present outside of the U.S. Now I think we’ve got a really tremendous capacity in Europe and in Asia.”

David Chapin, a member of the firm’s Policy Committee and a Boston-based private equity partner commented, “2011 was a challenging year for everyone involved in the private equity industry and we felt those headwinds but managed to work on a number of pretty interesting transactions. There’s no substitute for just being out in the market and working your contacts and working a variety of institutions to try and maximize terms and the amount of funding.”

Ropes & Gray was also named practice group of the year by Law360 for health care / life sciences, securities litigation and white collar.