Kirkland Alum Target Middle-Market Private Equity Deals Pipeline

A pair of former Kirkland & Ellis lawyers are looking expand their reach in middle market private equity deals amid choppy conditions.

Peter Massumi and Anthony Consoli, the founding partners of Massumi + Consoli, are adding to the firm’s roster to go after work across the private equity lifecycle. They’re focusing in particular on snagging a larger piece of middle market deals, including by bringing on lawyers with debt financing chops.

“What you can see is us having a soup-to-nuts offering for private equity,” Massumi said in an interview. “We’re there for you when you raise the funds and we’ll do the transactions, help you buy the companies, help to add value to those companies while you hold them, and help you to sell them.”

The firm has advised Chartbeat, LegalZoom, and SDC Capital Partners, among other clients. Its lawyers also represented investment firm FTV Capital in a $43 million investment in Masttro, a financial management tech company.

Massumi + Consoli seeks to grow as economic uncertainty, rising interest rates, and increasing regulatory scrutiny have dealmakers skittish.

Overall M&A transactions in the first quarter were the slowest since 2020, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Analysts found glimmer of hope that the pace will pick up in a wave of smaller private equity deals over the first three months of the year.

A Steady Hand

Massumi + Consoli brought on debt financing lawyers Matthew Berde and Jared Bryant in March. Bryant joined from McDermott Will & Emery, where he was a partner, and Berde jumped from a counsel role at Weil, Gotshal & Manges.

The firm is eyeing more specialists, adding lawyers who focus on tax, intellectual property, employee benefits, and data privacy, to augment private equity work. Its planning to bring on a partner with experience in private equity fund formation in the coming months, according to Massumi.

“It’s a very natural and obvious complement to our core M&A competencies, and a massive opportunity for us to add a lot of value for our clients where were weren’t really able to do it to this degree before,” Massumi said.

Massumi and Consoli, who launched the practice in 2015 after leaving Kirkland, want to carve out a niche in the middle-market.

“It’s a very competitive business and in this space, people are going for that perceived golden goose at the very top of the market,” said Consoli.

Dealmaking activity has receded compared to the bull market of the previous two years, but it’s more in-line with levels seen before the boom, said Erik Gordon, a professor in private equity at the University of Michigan. He expects a slow pickup in deals in the coming months, with more modest valuations, more risk-adverse dealmaking, and parties seeking to take on less debt.

“As we move through the rest of 2023, we will start to see the reality sinking in to the sellers what the valuations are now and they’re not going to jump back to the old high valuations six months from now,” Gordon said in an interview.

Massumi also anticipates more demand in the latter half of the year.

“You just have to have a steady hand through these times,” he said.