January 25, 2024 – Lawyers, investment bankers, and other business professionals can expect to encounter questions related to corporate valuation at all stages of their careers. A new treatise from Practising Law Institute’s PLI Press, Corporate Valuation in Mergers and Acquisitions, will serve as a useful reference for these questions, providing foundational perspectives involving legal, finance, accounting, and economic aspects of valuation in merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions.
Authored by Samuel C. Thompson, Jr. of Penn State Law, the book examines the role of investment bankers, valuation experts, and the courts in several M&A cases involving valuation issues. These cases include Time-Warner, a well-known 1989 case, and six other high-profile valuation cases, most recently the 2022 acquisition of X/Twitter as well as the acquisitions of Reynolds American Inc. (RAI) (2017), AOL (2015), Aruba Networks (2015), Dell (2013), and Clearwire (2012). The book’s appendices include extensive excerpts from documents in these and other cases.
This treatise digs deeply into the principal valuation techniques employed in M&A, including the Discounted Cash Flow (DCF), Comparable Companies, and Comparable Transactions Techniques, and introduces several other valuation techniques and related concepts.
Complementing the treatise, the author has shared a robust set of valuation documents, including a DCF Model, available for free on Penn State Law’s eLibrary site.
About the Author: Samuel C. Thompson, Jr. is Professor of Law, Arthur Weiss Distinguished Faculty Scholar, and Director of the Center for the Study of Mergers and Acquisitions at Penn State Law. An expert on tax and merger and acquisition law, he teaches the corporate, securities, tax, and antitrust aspects of mergers and acquisitions as well as valuation in M&A, international tax, and taxation of business entities. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Mergers, Acquisitions and Tender Offers: Law and Strategies — Corporate, Securities, Taxation, Antitrust, Cross-Border, Second Edition, and Business Taxation Deskbook: Corporations, Partnerships, Subchapter S, and International, both from PLI Press.
About Practising Law Institute (PLI)
Founded in 1933, Practising Law Institute (PLI) is a nonprofit learning organization dedicated to keeping attorneys and other professionals at the forefront of knowledge and expertise. PLI provides accredited continuing legal and professional education programs delivered by more than 4,000 volunteer faculty, including top experts across practice areas. Additionally, PLI publishes a comprehensive library of treatises, course handbooks, answer books, and journals, also available through the PLI PLUS online platform and app. The essence of PLI’s mission is a commitment to the pro bono community. Based in New York, PLI also has an office and Conference Center in San Francisco. Visit www.pli.edu to learn more.