Australian Firm’s Deals Work Propels It to Global Big Law Stage

Australia’s Allens has guided some of the year’s largest deals, helping it to garner the sort of notoriety usually reserved for the world’s largest law firms.

The firm steered long-term client CPP Investments, which acted alongside Blackstone Inc., in the pending purchase of data-center operator AirTrunk for $16.1 billion. Allens also helped Global Infrastructure Management in relation to BlackRock Inc.'s purchase of Global Infrastructure Partners for more than $12 billion.

The activity earned Allens the 20th spot on Bloomberg Law’s mergers and acquisitions league tables for the first three quarters of 2024, with contributions to 49 deals worth an approximate $64.9 billion collectively. The position was noteworthy for a firm the American Lawyer ranks as the 170th largest in the world by revenue.

“They’re top tier,” Jason Elias, chief executive officer at Sydney-based search firm Elias Recruitment, said of the law firm. “A lot of the M&A corporate deals would be with Allens.”

The firm has operated for more than 200 years and calls itself the oldest law operation in Australia. It has positioned itself to cash in on the country’s deal activity, some of which comes from significant energy and infrastructure investment in Australia.

“We are in a particular sweet spot in a perhaps more complicated geopolitical world,” Vijay Cugati, head of the mergers and acquisitions and capital markets team, said in an interview. “Australia continues to be an attractive investment destination.”

Read more: Bloomberg Law’s mergers and acquisitions league tables

Cugati, who also is co-head of the firm’s corporate practice, said that “in addition to the world’s largest sponsors, we’ve got the world’s largest infrastructure managers investing here—and that means the size of the tickets that are being played is growing.”

Coal, Minerals

Australia has been an attractive destination for global Big Law firms advisng on transactions involving large sponsors such as The Carlyle Group, KKR & Co. Inc., Blackstone and Brookfield Corp., as well as investment banks like JPMorgan Chase & Co. and UBS, which all have offices in Australia.

Big Law behemoths Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, Latham & Watkins, Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom, and Sullivan & Cromwell have saturated the local Australian market, steering local transactions.

Australia is rich in natural resources and critical minerals and is a leading producer of lithium, bauxite, opal and tantalum. It is also one of the main providers of coal across the globe.

Those resources are more integral with an accelerated global interest in artificial intelligence and a broader digitization, which requires more power sources.

“That computing power comes through the physical assets that underpin the digital economy, which means data centers, cables, and tower deals,” Cugati said. “That really is the big story about the M&A market in 2024.”

Allens guided Global Switch Australia Holdings on the $1.3 billion sale of its Australian data center operations to alternative asset manager HMC Capital Limited in October. The same month, the firm advised TPG Telecom on an agreement to sell its fiber network infrastructure and fixed assets to Vocus Group Limited for $3.5 billion.

The firm also guided Rio Tinto on the Australian aspects of its $6.7 billion acquisition of Arcadium Lithium. The lithium asset transaction was the second largest in Australia this year.

Australia is also home to one of the world’s fastest growing pools of pension capital, partly because it implements a guaranteed contribution by all employers for their employees. “Pensions managers are doing deals,” Cugati said. “They have so much money they need to put to work.”

Australia’s M&A transaction volumes have remained steady so far in 2023, on a path to be slightly lower than or equal to the volumes of the previous year, according to Bloomberg data. Public M&A deals in the period were concentrated in oil and gas, critical minerals, renewables, energy transition or sponsors turning over assets.

“There wasn’t the buoyancy that we saw in previous years across all sectors,” Cugati said. “For example, our real estate investment practice and financial services clients practice were probably softer in the public space.”

Allens

Allens has about 150 partners, of which more than 30 partners do mergers and acquisitions, Cugati said. M&A and litigation are the firm’s two largest practices by partner number.

The firm chooses to support markets in which it sees the most investment from offshore into Australia through coverage teams that focus specifically on the US, Japan, India, and China. Allens also has a partnership with Linklaters, which allows clients to avail global coverage, particularly in Europe, through the firm.

The Linklaters alliance and similar partnerships with other firms offer a benefit to lawyers at Allens, allowing them to travel to London and the US.

“Australians love to work overseas, particularly in London and New York,” Cugati said.