Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom

In its own words “Skadden began as a scrappy upstart among a sea of established “white shoe” firms in New York”, and the firm takes pride in this outsider culture even today. Skadden started out in 1948 and made its mark in the proxy fights of the 1950s and the hostile takeovers of the 1970s, and has since then become a mainstay in the global and transatlantic M&A scene. In 2024, Skadden concluded 186 deals globally with a total value of $363 billion, the third highest in global M&A volume. That said, trainees can expect a much richer experience than just M&A - from a Band 1 Legal 500 international arbitration practice and a Band 2 capital markets practice to specialist practice areas in support of deal making. Skadden M&A and corporate practice is ranked as Band 1 in Chambers & Partners Global practice and Band 2 in the UK in the premium (£800 million and above) brackets. In London, Skadden has established first-tier capability in Takeover Code regulated transactions and acted on a handful of sector-agnostic take-private mandates involving London-listed targets in 2023-2024. These include advising Willis Tower Watson on its $30 billion takeover by Aon, International Paper Company in its $9.9 billion contested offer to acquire DS Smith plc, and Danaher Corporation in its $5.6 billion offer to acquire Abcam plc. Skadden’s London practice also boasts robust non-public and private equity transactional practices which enhance the firm’s US corporate offering while also serving a distinctive UK client base of their own. Trainees get to work on some of the most high-profile transactions as UK-side counsel like Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, and, most recently, BlackRock’s acquisition of HPS, while also developing strong relationships with longstanding London clients such as Hg, Castik, and JAB Holding. To round out its equity financing services, Skadden’s integrated US and UK equity capital markets team serves as a key port of call for European and UK issuer-side clients, handling dual listings, redomiciliations, and cross-border public and private placements. This is especially valuable for clients: given the sluggish capital markets fundraising environment in the UK and Europe, Skadden is strategically positioned to help clients tap into deeper capital pools across the Atlantic. Such expertise was demonstrated in the firm’s recent advice to Hochschild Mining plc on the demerger and listing of its subsidiary Aclara Resources on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Skadden’s London office is equally renowned for its international arbitration practice, which, notably, is the only Band 1 Legal 500 practice of the firm in 2024 - a year when transactional work is still recovering from the slowdown of 2022-2023. Earlier this year, the team achieved a rare annulment of an arbitration award in an investor-state dispute under the ICSID Convention, representing Agility Public Warehousing Company (Agility) against the Republic of Iraq. The case stands out because annulment claims in investor-state proceedings under the ICSID Convention very rarely succeed, with only 5% of all applications having been successful, most of them being applications from the states. Nevertheless, in a majority decision, the annulment committee sided with Agility and Skadden, concluding that the original tribunal had erred in its ruling for Iraq. The committee determined that Agility had been expropriated and subjected to unfair and inequitable conduct of the Republic of Iraq under the Kuwait-Iraq bilateral investment treaty. Skadden’s impact in the UK legal industry extends beyond billable work: pro bono service is a core part of the firm’s identity. In 2023, lawyers in the London office dedicated 15,000 hours to pro bono efforts, including a significant partnership with Coram Children’s Legal Centre. Through this collaboration, Skadden advised minors with unresolved immigration status on applications for British citizenship, recognising the heightened risks that they would otherwise face including poverty and limited access to education and adequate healthcare.