Video Transcription
Barry Grossman 00:02
Hello everyone. I'm Barry Grossman. I'm one of the founding partners of Ellenoff Grossman & Schole. We are a New York-based law firm that also has offices in California, with approximately 125 lawyers at this point. The firm is corporate-focused; about 70-75% of the lawyers are in the corporate department. We also have an IP group, a Labor and Employment group, and we do litigation and real estate. We're basically set up to handle small companies. We're not representing the Facebooks of the world, but we are representing smaller companies that are looking to grow and expand. As I said, we're based in New York, and we also have an office in California.
I guess the slides one behind show all the different areas we practice in. For the purposes of this conference, there are really two areas where we can help a lot of the companies here. We do a lot of M&A work; we have about 15 to 20 lawyers who work in the M&A department, almost 30 at this point. We work on all sorts of cross-border transactions. We've done transactions with Israeli companies, Chinese companies, Singapore, Indonesia, Korea, Netherlands, England—you name a country, we've done deals there.
What we also do, which is helpful for a lot of people here, is financing work. We've done financings on both the issuer and the underwriter side, or the placement agent side, both private and public. We currently represent approximately 35 different investment banks and about 35 different funds. The funds include family offices, private equity groups, and venture capital groups. So if you have a company, or if you're working for a company that needs to raise capital, we can help you raise that money.
The amount that we're seeing in the current market is that a lot of people are raising in the $5 to $15 million bridge financing range, and then obviously $15 to $30, or $40, or $50 million on the IPO or second round of financings. One thing that's happening in the U.S. right now is that there's lots of money out there, and the bankers and the funds are looking to place that money. People think the end of the year is a slow season; it's actually quite the opposite. The bankers don't get paid commissions and don't make money unless they close deals, and the funds don't make their 2% or their carried interest unless they invest the money.
So a firm like ours will have 10 or 11 months that are fairly flat, and then December is when people are looking to close deals. In the last four or five years, we've seen about 200 to 250 deals that we've closed on either the issuer or the financing side, and we're on pace to do about the same this year. On the M&A side of the world, we were ranked in the top 25 for the first time in the number of M&A deals closed in 2023. Once again, we're not closing the monster deals; we're not closing the deals with, you know, the Facebooks of the world, but we are closing deals for companies that are worth a few hundred million dollars, or even less than a few hundred million dollars.
We did a number of deals last year for companies that were closer to the $25 to $50 million range. A good portion of those deals, once again, were international deals. We've had a number of clients make acquisitions offshore. We've had foreign companies that have come in and bought our U.S. companies. So on the M&A side, we are seeing a lot of activity for the same reason—not the same reason, but because the private companies in the U.S. are having problems raising money on the private side, so they're going out and doing M&A deals because of their technologies.
We also have a number of our public companies buying private companies and using their stock as collateral. In this way, they're out there funding the private companies and helping them get to the next step. This is really just a highlight of different deals that we've closed recently. You'll see there's a variety of deals in a variety of spaces. SurgePay actually just closed another deal; that public company's stock is doing okay, but people seem to like it and think there's a lot of potential there.
There's an old picture of me with a lot less gray hair, but there's a lot of activity going on out there. There's a lot of money available in the U.S. markets. We're representing a number of companies that are non-U.S. companies, be it in Poland, England, or wherever they might be, and they're coming to the U.S. to raise money. They're coming to us to be bought and sold. So if anyone has any questions or needs any help, please feel free to reach out to us. Thank you.
