After a few years of hard times for Washington attorneys who handle mergers and acquisitions, the practice may have turned the corner. The M&A practices at major firms, which suffered in the wake of the financial crisis, have seen an increase in activity during the latter part of 2012 which in turn has led to an increase in work for antitrust attorneys advocating those deals.
"I’m not sure that we’ll return to the peak years that we saw around the mid-2000s," said Eric Berman, a D.C. partner at Williams Mullen who handles antitrust and M&A work. But during the fourth quarter of 2012, he said, "we definitely saw an uptick in deal activity. So far in 2013, there has been more M&A activity at this point in the year since 2005."
