The New York Times made a big to-do Sunday over Linklaters taking over the top spot in the Mergermarket deal adviser rankings, with more than $720 billion worth of deals to the firm’s credit. The Magic Circle firm had supplanted Sullivan & Cromwell and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, a development that “must come as a blow to the traditional leaders of the law league tables,” the NYT wrote.
Really though, S&C and Skadden have nothing to worry about. S&C finished atop Dealogic’s annual M&A rankings, with Skadden coming in second and Linklaters nowhere to be found in the top ten. Linklaters did finish in the top spot in the other two most-watched league tables–those would be Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters–but the dollar value of the deals was different on each chart; Bloomberg credited Linklaters with advising on $364 billion in deals, Dealogic didn’t list them at all, Thomson Reuters calculated $468 billion for Linklaters, and Mergermarket had the value way up at the aforementioned $720-plus billion.
