Keith Townsend is a partner in King & Spalding’s corporate, finance and investments practice. He represents public companies in capital markets transactions, governance matters and mergers and acquisitions.

In 2019, he led a team as it advised TSYS in its all-stock merger of equals with Global Payments. The $21.5 billion transaction created a $54 billion company that provides payment services to around 3.5 million merchants around the world and more than 1,300 financial institutions.

What are the hardest challenges in a deal, and at what point do you advise a client that “no deal” is better than a bad deal?

Part of our job as transactional lawyers is to try to avoid hard spots in a deal. At the outset of any M&A transaction, we always try to understand the client’s goals and educate the business people on what the key legal issues can be for the specific transaction at hand. From there, we provide the client with a range of typical outcomes and help them on the front end to toggle expectations to match what their business goals are. So from my perspective, if we know the client’s expectations on the front end and we’ve educated them on the key legal risks, then we should be able to avoid any pain points throughout the deal process.

Our job is to facilitate the client’s commercial goals, so it’s important that we get our clients to a place where they can make the deal happen. If we’ve clearly laid out the deal’s objectives with our client on the front end, it becomes very easy to come together and make a decision when it’s time to walk away. To me, it’s all about open communication on the front end and being transparent throughout the process to manage the client’s expectations.

Who are one or two people who helped you achieve your career success, and how did they do that?

From a personal standpoint, I’m very lucky to have come from a situation where I had incredibly supportive parents. My education was important to them, and they always supported the things I wanted to do. They never pushed me to do anything that I wasn’t interested in, and I have more appreciation for that now as I raise my own kids. My upbringing certainly had a positive impact on my professional career, but I also had several mentors in my early years at King & Spalding that helped me get to where I am today. Specifically, there were two partners, Alan Prince and J. Kelley, that I did most of my public company work for when I was associate. I felt lucky because both of these senior partners set aside their personal time to train me to do my job at a high level. As I’ve progressed in my career, I’ve become more grateful for their guidance and always try to pay it forward with the young attorneys I work with now.