We supported Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust (KCHFT) in the successful sale of Sandwich Dental Service.
Read moreMergers & Acquisitions
Our corporate transaction lawyers are experts in mergers and acquisitions. We provide support on the acquisition trail as you grow your business.
Talk to usAs one of the UK’s most active legal teams for merger and acquisition (M&A) activity, our award-winning lawyers provide the guidance and efficiency you need throughout your growth journey.
Acquisitions — or ‘buy and build’ — can be a successful strategy for growth, helping your business to gain new customers, skills and technology, enter new markets and create valuable synergies. However, it can also prove expensive, time-consuming and distracting to complete due diligence, negotiate and close deals and subsequently integrate new businesses.
Our long and storied history of providing strategic support to clients on the acquisition trail means that you can focus on what matters most while we drive the transactions through and handle the detail.
We advise serial acquirers on all sizes of transaction and understand the complexities of corporate deals. Our approach is founded on collaboration, consistency, continuity of care and capacity.
We excel at building trusted, long-term relationships and supporting your vision for both organic and acquisitive growth. By minimising the attritional impact that transactions can have, we enable you to focus on your business and integration plans.
Our corporate solicitors advised on 188 transactions last year with a combined value of over £800m for a range of private companies and household name businesses.
We also won the Corporate Law Firm of the Year award at the Insider North West Dealmakers Awards 2025 and were shortlisted twice for Deal of the Year.
Discuss your ambitions with our corporate M&A lawyers by calling 0333 004 4488, emailing hello@brabners.com or completing our contact form below.
A 'Top Tier' law firm for corporate M&A
Your strategic partners for business transactions & acquisitions
Corporate transactions require the expertise of more than just corporate lawyers. As a full-service, multidisciplinary law firm, we can call on a wide range of in-house experts to ensure that you’re getting the right support at every stage, whether pre- or post-deal.
We appreciate the day-to-day difficulties you’ll face and the market pressures that impact on your business. Our innovative, client-focused approach to corporate transactions will help you to meet your commercial, operational and strategic objectives as you grow through acquisitions.
We provide a seamless service. To ensure consistency and continuity of care, we’ll understand and adopt the internal processes and procedures that you currently have in place. We’ll also help you to identify opportunities to add value and create efficiencies.
Our transaction team will be handpicked based on your deal requirements. Throughout our relationship, we’ll provide efficient, pragmatic and proactive support and advice during all your transactions. We’ll also work collaboratively with your own team and other advisors.
We have an impressive track record of supporting a large number of corporates with their acquisition strategies, including NWF Group plc, Begbies Traynor Group plc, All About Children, Chase de Vere and James Hall & Co Ltd (SPAR).
A holistic approach to corporate mergers & acquisitions
At the outset of a transaction, we take the time to understand your business, the target business (and its key stakeholders) as well as your key deal priorities. We’ll tailor our approach accordingly and focus on what’s important to you.
We're the only UK law firm with a dedicated Deal Advisory team — a professional services firm of specialist accountants who concentrate on proactively creating deals. This enables us to identify your acquisition targets, make contact and take the right steps for future growth while you focus on the day job. This unique offering gives you the best possible financial and legal advice in one place.
We'll always provide you with a dedicated relationship manager to ensure consistency of approach and continuity of care. Our team will take care of the ‘leg work’, efficiently managing acquisition trails that involve multiple transactions at any one time and alleviating the corresponding pressure on your management team.
By adopting tailored template documentation (heads of terms, legal due diligence questionnaires and reports and acquisition agreements) and a clear, consistent reporting style, we’ll align with your goals and provide clear ‘to-do’ lists to minimise your review time.
Our transaction summary reports will flag any key commercial changes from the heads of terms and material departures from template documents to keep you aware of the issues without having to read into the transaction documents. This will feed into any post-completion plan to help with the integration process, which we know is where the hard work really begins.
Underpinning our transactional and commercial expertise is the strength of our other teams that specialise in regulatory, employment, pensions, real estate, intellectual property, procurement and commercial contract matters.
Experts in large & international transactions
We provide leading legal solutions for expanding international businesses and often our larger or more complex transactions have an international angle. We regularly assist international clients looking to make acquisitions in the UK, as well as UK acquirers in their expansion plans abroad.
Our affiliations with leading law firm networks The Association of European Lawyers and Eurolegal provide access to expert legal advice in almost all jurisdictions.
Many of our larger transactions, especially those where the sellers include a private equity firm, involve warranty and indemnity insurance (W&I). This can help buyers to bridge the gap in contractual cover left when certain sellers, including private equity, are not able or willing to provide warranties and indemnities. Our buyer clients often look at W&I at the bid stage of a transaction as a tool to add weight to their bid.
Once identified as the preferred bidder, the buyer’s due diligence process will then help to inform the scope and extent of any W&I cover available in the market and in particular any specific exclusions to cover which will typically form the subject matter of specific indemnities or additional warranties to be negotiated with the sellers.
“I worked with Brabners for over 12 years to grow the nursery group through numerous acquisitions as well as the eventual sale of the group in 2022. Having a dedicated team that understood the business’s commercial drivers made each acquisition efficient and smooth, which enabled rapid growth without significant disruption. Simon Lewis in particular provided more than legal advice and became a trusted adviser to me personally.”
CEO, All About Children
“We've worked with Brabners' corporate team [and] Sam Mabon for over ten years on all our acquisitions... The team understands our sector and the regulatory landscape, which is invaluable to mitigate risk and maximise ROI. The longstanding relationship means we know and trust that Brabners protects our interests while taking a commercial approach to negotiations. The team drives the transaction and ensures that it completes within the agreed timeframe.”
Legal & Regulatory Director, Chase de Vere
“NWF Group plc has worked with Rupert Gill and the wider team at Brabners for over 25 years. During that time, Brabners has worked on circa 40 corporate transactions for us, sometimes several in any given year. The knowledge that the team has gained of our businesses and how we operate has helped to smooth the acquisition process. Their use of standard documents and a reporting process that we know helps to reduce the management time involved.”
CEO, NWF Group plc
Nationally recognised ‘Hall of Fame’ M&A experts
Based in the North but covering the entire country, our corporate team has been recognised by Experian as one of the UK’s most active for M&A activity. We act for clients across a wide range of industry sectors. The team attracts routine acknowledgement in The Legal 500, including in its ‘Hall of Fame’ and as a ‘Top Tier Firm’. We've also had success at the Insider North West Dealmakers Awards, winning ‘Corporate Law Firm of the Year’.
Our corporate team is headed up by Mark Rathbone, a Legal 500 ‘Leading Partner’ who brings over 30 years’ experience in handling corporate and commercial transactions on behalf of domestic and global clients. He works closely alongside highly experienced corporate lawyer Jon Close, who has a strong reputation for being user-friendly, straight-talking, pragmatic and solutions-driven in his deal approach.
Rupert Gill — described in the Legal 500 as "brilliant" and having "great commercial expertise" — has worked with clients including James Hall & Company Limited (SPAR), NWF Group PLC, Torus and Regenda. He brings a significant track record in advising both owner-managers and PLCs on multiple acquisitions, including having undertaken every corporate acquisition for two separate clients over a 20+ year period.
Nicola Lomas provides specialist support for healthcare clients. Recognised nationally for handling a significant volume of dental practice sales and purchases, Nicola acts for a broad range of clients from small, part-time sole practitioners to large, multi-site corporate groups. She’s a ‘Next Generation Partner’ in The Legal 500.
The team also includes ‘Recommended Lawyer’ Simon Lewis, whose pragmatic and solutions-focused approach has yielded results in several multi-million-pound acquisitions and disposals, including for All About Children and William Hare Group. There’s also the ‘excellent’ Sam Mabon, another Legal 500 ‘Recommended Lawyer’ whose strong track record on corporate matters includes work on behalf of Aleph Group, Chase de Vere and Asertis.
Brabners Deal Advisory is led by Paula McGrath, who brings over three decades’ experience in working on numerous major deals across the North.
Meet our corporate team
Specialist litigators for company M&A disputes
If you're facing a dispute following a merger or acquisition — such as a breach of warranty or indemnity claim or a joint venture or shareholder dispute — our litigation lawyers are here to support you.
There are many types of dispute that can arise following the successful completion of a deal. That's why our M&A team works closely with our litigation team to help you resolve any issues quickly and effectively.
If you’re facing any type of company dispute, talk to our team today.
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