Weil has long provided legal counsel to large and middle-market chemical companies and their investors, with particular strengths in transactional law and commercial and antitrust litigation. Our corporate lawyers have handled both groundbreaking M&A deals as well as a score of key medium-sized to smaller transactions in the industry. We have also acted for numerous private equity firms, including TPG Capital, American Capital, Cerberus Partners, HM Capital Partners LLC, Advent International, and Thomas H. Lee Partners, in their investments in the broader chemicals industry. Our notable deals in the industry include General Electric Company’s $11.6 billion sale of GE Plastics to Saudi Basic Industries Corporation; Access Industries’ successful €4.4 billion bid for Basell NV, a 50-50 joint venture owned by BASF and Shell Chemicals; Great Lakes Chemical Corporation’s merger with Crompton Corporation; and Millennium Chemicals, Inc.’s $2.3 billion merger with Lyondell Chemical Co.

Our comprehensive approach to antitrust/competition law goes hand in glove with our M&A skills, as clients often retain Weil to gain merger clearance in major transactions; however, our antitrust work extends beyond the M&A context and into class action lawsuits of great commercial significance. We have served as counsel to numerous companies involved in class actions in connection with alleged price fixing and conspiracy, including:

• defense of a nationwide class action where plaintiffs were claiming billions of dollars in damages as a result of alleged price-fixing against a group of integrated oil & gas companies including ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Citgo, and Marathon Oil;
• counsel to Sumitomo Chemical in consolidated class actions alleging price-fixing in the U.S. and international markets for vitamins;
• defense of a major petrochemicals producer in consolidated U.S. class actions seeking collective recovery for alleged price fixing of industrial rubber;
• defense of a major Japanese industrial company in a six-year price fixing investigation by European and U.S. regulators. The matter was closed without charges.