Insurance Brokerage Transactions

Insurance Brokerage Mergers & Acquisitions

At Williams Mullen, we help insurance brokerages grow through acquisition. To best harness our institutional knowledge advising insurance brokerage, we formed the Insurance Brokerage Industry Team. Our team is comprised of attorneys who are focused on advising clients in this industry to help them build their business and obtain their strategic goals. For close to thirty years, our firm has served as go-to counsel for leading publicly-held and privately-held insurance firms. Given the highly acquisitive environment in the current brokerage marketplace, our deal teams have completed dozens of deals in the past several years. 

Our Insurance Brokerage Industry Team includes resources in employment law, executive compensation, benefits, tax and corporate law. So, whether you are a one office brokerage or one of the largest brokerages in the nation, we will bring to the table an understanding of your business, a knowledge of the law and a goal to help create opportunities so that your business  can reach its full potential. We are adept when it comes to understanding the industry and investors, negotiating deals where keeping people is important and building transaction efficiencies. We also have the bandwidth of experienced attorneys that can proficiently lead multiple deal teams concurrently.

Representative Insurance Industry Transactions

• Represented a financial and real estate transaction services provider in its acquisition of an insurance services company in a transaction valued at over $250 million
• Represented an insurance and risk management company in its acquisition of middle market insurance intermediary in a transaction valued at over $130 million
• Represented an insurance and risk management company in its acquisition of an insurance subsidiary in a transaction valued at over $90 million
• Represented several of the nation’s largest insurance agencies in 14 separate acquisitions of employee benefits service companies and P&C brokers across the country
• Served as co-counsel in the sale of an insurance and risk management company to a global insurance broker for over $2.0 billion

Employment Issues

We know that your people are your most important assets. Our employment attorneys advise clients with a focus on mitigating employee litigation and supporting the firm’s strategic objectives. Our Insurance Brokerage Industry employment lawyers can help develop and execute an approach to minimize the risk of losing top talent. We assist with:

• Review of and advice on restrictive covenants, including,  non-solicitation and non-competition restrictions, and confidentiality covenants
• Negotiation of deals between prior employers and new employers
• Advice on unfair competition issues and employee raiding
• Representation of employers and their executives in injunctive and other trial proceedings to enforce, or prevent the enforcement of, non-compete and non-solicitation agreements, employment contracts, confidentiality agreements and restrictions on the use of trade secrets 

Executive Compensation, Employee Benefits and Benefits Consulting

Employee benefits law is highly sophisticated and ever-changing. Effective employee benefits lawyers must be grounded in labor, tax, corporate and securities law, while also being attentive to the economic and legal developments that affect employee benefits.

Over the years, we have worked closely with our insurance brokerage clients in providing support benefitting their producers. We help our insurance brokerage clients with:

• All areas of employee benefits law, including ESOPs, 401(k) plans, pension plans, health plans, disability plans, and cafeteria plans
• Nonqualified deferred compensation, stock-based compensation, and severance arrangements
• Executive compensation arrangements that complement qualified plan benefits for key employees
• Providing resources to answer employee benefits questions that arise from your clients
• Providing model documents
• Producing content for newsletters, alerts or blogs
• Custom educational events on important employee benefits issues that can be offered to both your team and your clients

General Corporate Advice for Insurance Brokerages

If you don’t have an extensive in-house legal team or you just have more work on your plate than you can get to, our corporate attorneys can help. We often serve as the primary legal resource for insurance brokerages in many ways, including providing advice on:

• Contracts
• Capital acquisition
• General business planning
• Corporate governance