Whitman R. Cole
Managing Partner
Whitman has run the firm since 2016 and has closed transactions on both sides of the table for twenty-eight years.
Background
Whitman leads the firm and its mergers and acquisitions practice. He advises strategic acquirers, private equity sponsors and founder-led companies on transactions between $50 million and $3 billion, with a particular concentration in industrials, logistics and healthcare services.
He is most often brought in at the point where a deal has stopped moving: a diligence finding nobody wants to price, a second bidder who has gone quiet, a regulator with a question that was not anticipated. His view is that a transaction is a negotiation about risk allocation, and that most of the value is created or destroyed in the three weeks around the first draft of the purchase agreement.
Whitman joined the firm in 1998 and became a partner in 2004. He chairs the firm hiring committee and teaches a seminar on deal structure at his alma mater.
Selected matters.
- Lead counsel on the $1.4 billion sale of a Midwest industrial manufacturer, including a second-request response cleared in fourteen weeks.
- Advised a founder-led logistics platform on a majority recapitalisation with 34 percent rollover equity.
- Counsel to a sponsor across eleven add-on acquisitions on a single platform in twenty-two months.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
Bring Whitman the problem.
The first conversation is with the partner who would run the matter, and it is not billed.