What is the Wachtell US Law Firm, its salary, fees, owner, clients and cases as Gautam Adani hires it vs Hindenburg Research

What is the Wachtell US Law Firm, its salary, fees, owner, clients and cases as Gautam Adani hires it vs Hindenburg Research

Wachtell is a US-based legal firm, know the law firm salary and fees

Find out more about it, its founders, prominent cases, and much more.

Shares of Adani Group firms have plummeted since New York-based investment research company Hindenburg Research accused the billionaire Gautam Adani-led conglomerate of blatant stock manipulation and fraudulent accounting activity over the course of decades.

For most law firms, work on mergers and acquisitions is paid by the usual model of billable hours and and then there is Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.

What is the Wachtell US Law Firm, its salary, fees, owner, founder, clients and cases as Gautam Adani hires it vs Hindenburg Research

Thanks to a client letter obtained by The American Lawyer, the wider world now knows how Wachtell — regarded as one of the premier legal deal shops around — makes its money, at least when it comes to M.&A and the document in question is a 2012 letter from Wachtell to the general counsel of CVR Energy, an oil refiner that had hired the law firm to (ultimately unsuccessfully) defend it against the billionaire activist investor Carl C. Icahn.

In the letter, Wachtell partner Benjamin Roth outlines the unusual billing structure for mergers work: a $200,000 fee paid up front, followed by an estimated percentage of a resulting transaction and that typically ranges from at least 1 percent for any matter under $250 million to 0.1 percent or less for deals over $25 billion. (

The firm advised Allergan in its $66 billion sale to the fellow drug maker Actavis and 0.1 percent, the Wachtell team led by Daniel Neff and David Katz would have brought in $66 million in fees for that assignment.

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According to The American Lawyer’s most recent annual rankings, the firm tops its competitors in the closely watched measure of profits per partner, which came in at nearly $4.8 million in 2013 and it ranked seventh in Thomson Reuters‘ list of top legal deal advisers for 2014, with 104 transactions worth $366 billion.

While the fees and salary goes, “The firm does not furnish long-descriptions of services or details as to particular lawyers and hours,” the billing policy states.

Not only that, but the Adani Group’s reputation has also suffered. Gautam Adani has now recruited one of the best and most expensive law firms in the US to fight back against an American short-seller firm.

The Financial Times reported that the attorneys for the Adani Group at the Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas company contacted Wachtell. Since then, Wachtell has become the talk of the town with many people trying to find out more about it. So, here’s what we know about it:

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More about Wachtell

Herb Wachtell, Martin Lipton, Leonard Rosen, and George Katz, four New York-based attorneys who had previously worked together at NYU, created Wachtell Lipton in 1965. The company is known for taking on challenging corporate governance disputes.

According to the legal firm, it has experience in the following fields: corporate and securities law; mergers and acquisitions; strategic investments; takeovers and takeover defense; and shareholder activism. It has a history of creating innovative concepts and advancements that have greatly impacted business and law.

According to the company’s LinkedIn site, the Wachtell legal firm employs 500 to 1,000 individuals.

Its practices and case studies

Wachtell Lipton is a prominent law firm that has significantly impacted representing some of the most consequential matters for major financial institutions. The firm has earned a reputation for defending companies that were under attack by shareholder activists and has advised numerous public companies on a variety of issues.

The impressive list of clients that Wachtell Lipton has represented includes names such as AOL, Vulcan Materials, Clorox, Forest Laboratories, CVR Energy, Target, Motorola, Office Depot, Longs Drugs, Lionsgate, and Convergys.

The firm has also dealt with activist shareholders such as Carl Icahn, Pershing Square, and JANA Partners, as well as other hedge fund and corporate governance activists. In addition to representing individual companies, Wachtell Lipton has also played a critical role in advising the NYSE on its listing standards and corporate governance initiatives for listed companies.

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The firm has a deep understanding of the complexities of corporate governance and has advised company boards and management teams on sensitive issues such as sustainability, ESG, and corporate purpose.

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