Why M&A Ace Taurie Zeitzer is Betting on Herself
Ben Thomson, LawFuel contributing editor
BigLaw heavyweight White & Case have lost a major player, with Taurie Zeitzer – one of their highest-paid partners – leaving the firm to start her new consultancy.
With Taurie Zeitger we’re not talking about just any lawyer.
We’re talking about a $15 million–plus compensation package kind of lawyer. She’s a mergers and acquisitions (M&A) superstar who came to White & Case from Paul Weiss about a year ago after leaving Paul Weiss, where she co-headed their M&A group.
She is yet to provide full details of her new consultancy, according to a report in Bloomberg Law.
Word on the street was that some partners raised eyebrows at her salary then. Fast forward to now, and she’s decided to peace out and start her own M&A advisory firm.
Zeitzer’s exit comes at an interesting time. She mentioned in a press release that the market is totally different now, with “unprecedented situations.”As she says, it’s all about redefining how to partner with clients to develop and implement creative and effective solutions.
Who IS Taurie Zeitzer?
Zeitzer is known for her big-league M&A deals and her close ties to Apollo Global Management. She’s been involved in a ton of transactions, especially with Apollo, also handling work for Searchlight Capital Partners and Gamut Capital Management since their inception.
Building both a strong relationship with her clients and developing a long-term strategy to serve them has been a key to her client relationships.
However, the number of deals she was publicly linked to dropped last year, which raises some questions about what White & Case was expecting when they brought her on board. Was the firm banking on her bringing Apollo’s business with her?
From ADT to Shutterfly, Zeitzer has been an advisor to some of the largest deals that impact your everyday life. According to her profile at White & Case, Zeitzer has a passion for building, mentoring, and sponsoring high-performance teams.
She takes a deeply personal approach to her M&A work being fully invested in their success, stating, “I win when the client wins, and I feel the body blows when the client loses.”
“We are seeing an entirely different market than in recent years with a wide variety of unprecedented situations,” she said.
She sees these market complexities as creating “new opportunities, such as redefining how to partner with clients to develop and implement creative and effective solutions” perhaps suggesting that she believes a new approach is needed to navigate the evolving M&A environment.
Her new venture is envisioned as a strategic advisory firm that will provide a “more agile and personalized model for addressing the increasingly complex challenges faced by boards and investors today”.
Her new firm will focus on high-stakes transactions, integration and expansion solutions, and M&A quarterbacking.
Essentially, Zeitzer seems inspired by the prospect of leveraging her expertise to offer innovative and tailored solutions in a dynamic M&A world, seizing what she perceives as an opportune time for a new, more flexible advisory
