Ropes & Gray PE and Technology Teams Extend 2021 Streak with Completion of $14 Billion McAfee Sale

Ropes & Gray’s award-winning private equity and technology groups, having completed a dynamic year in 2021 advising on a series of multi-billion dollar deals, represented McAfee Corp. in the completion of its sale to a private equity investor group in a transaction valued at more than $14 billion.

McAfee, a global leader in online protection, was acquired by an investor group that included Advent International, Permira Advisers, Crosspoint Capital Partners, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, GIC Private Limited and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. The closing of the transaction was announced on March 1 in a press release.

Ropes & Gray is a preeminent law firm for market-leading private equity sponsors, investors and companies executing ambitious and complex deals. The firm was named “Technology Group of the Year” for 2021 by Law360 in recognition for the breadth of its work for PE clients investing in software, life sciences and health care technology, consumer hardware, semiconductors, digital platforms and fintech.

Over the past year, Ropes & Gray’s private equity and technology groups advised:

• Altimeter Growth Corp. in its $40 billion merger with Grab Holdings.
• TPG Capital in its deal with AT&T Inc. that spun off DirecTV into a separate company in a transaction valued at $16.25 billion.
• McAfee Corp. in the $4 billion sale of its pure play cybersecurity business to Symphony Technology Group.
• TPG Capital in its $4 billion carve-out acquisition alongside Francisco Partners of Boomi, a provider of cloud-based integration platform services, from Dell.
• Vista Equity Partners and DealerSocket, an SaaS provider to the auto industry, in its $15 billion sale to Solera Holdings, Inc.
• Dragoneer Growth Opportunities Corp. in its $5.9 billion merger with CCC Intelligent Solutions, a tech platform focused on consumer insurance data. [Ropes & Gray’s capital markets team also represented Dragoneer in its $690 million SPAC IPO].
• TPG and Wind River in the software company’s $4.3 billion sale to Aptiv PLC.

“Ropes & Gray has navigated a staggering number of high-stakes, highly complex technology deals over the past 15 months,” said Edward Black, co-head of Ropes & Gray's technology, media & telecommunications practice group. “Our world-class private equity, M&A and technology teams continue to respond to the robust flow of complex, cross-border deals with exceptional, innovative and pragmatic advice for clients across a wide range of industries.”

In 2021, Ropes & Gray lawyers advised on more than 220 private equity deals valued at more than $200 billion eclipsing its own record set in 2020 of more than 190 transactions valued at $140 billion. In the process, Ropes & Gray rose to 3rd place in Mergermarket’s 2021 U.S. league tables for private equity buyouts by value, and retained its 3rd place ranking for buyouts by deal count.

“We have a global team ready to advise PE clients in ambitious and cutting-edge large cap and middle-market deals,” said Carolyn Vardi, head of the firm’s private equity industry group. “There is no deal too complex for our global team.”

Ropes & Gray leverages its cross-practice and cross-office teams located throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia to provide clients with sophisticated advice on transactions throughout the lifecycle of business and companies. The firm was named Transatlantic Firm of the Year at The British Legal Awards 2021 in recognition for the size and scale of its work in Europe.

The team representing McAfee was led by private equity and M&A partners Michael Roh and Chris Comeau (Boston), Howard Glazer (San Francisco) and Kate Withers (New York), and included commercial & securities litigation partners Randy Bodner and Daniel McCaughey (both of Boston), tax partner Adam Greenwood (New York), litigation & enforcement partners Ama Adams and Maria Calvet (both of Washington, D.C.), antitrust partners Ruchit Patel (London) and Jonathan Klarfeld (Washington, D.C.), leveraged finance partners Arek Maczka and Jay Kim (both of New York), and mergers & acquisitions partner Thomas Holden (San Francisco), employment, executive compensation & benefits partners Megan Bisk and Kyle Higley (both of Boston), IP transactions partner Megan Baca (Silicon Valley), mergers & acquisitions counsel Thomas Burke (New York), litigation & enforcement counsel Gregory Demers and Deidre Johnson (both of Boston), and data, privacy & cybersecurity partner Edward McNicholas (Washington, D.C.).