Corporate & M&A

Overview

The Corporate group closes roughly sixty to eighty transactions a year, ranging from eight-figure family-business sales to cross-border joint ventures. We have built the practice around the kinds of companies Hartford actually produces: insurance and reinsurance carriers, advanced-materials manufacturers, regional energy businesses, and the founder-owned service companies that supply them. The group is led by Managing Partner Steven Stone, who spent seven years as in-house counsel to a Hartford industrial holding company before returning to private practice.

Middle-market M&A is the center of gravity. We represent sellers more often than buyers — a byproduct of fifty years of client relationships with Connecticut founders — but private equity sponsors now make up a meaningful share of the group's buy-side work. Equity partner Giovanni Marchetti, who led thirty-plus closed deals at a New York fund before joining the firm, runs most of that docket. A typical engagement pairs a corporate lead with attorneys from Tax, Labor & Employment, Real Estate, and (for insurance-sector targets) regulatory counsel, so the deal team is not a rotating cast.

Technology transactions and SaaS licensing have grown into a distinct sub-practice under Jasmine Pendleton. She handles master services agreements, data-processing addenda, and the data-privacy overlay that has become unavoidable since the Connecticut Data Privacy Act took effect in 2023. Junior partner Sidney Schwartz leads venture capital financings for emerging growth companies and manages the firm's relationships with a handful of Hartford and New Haven accelerators.

Insurance-sector deals require familiarity with the Connecticut Insurance Holding Company Act and routine engagement with the Connecticut Insurance Department. Form A filings, Form D approvals, and the pre-acquisition notice regime are part of the group's regular workload. We have closed twelve insurance-company change-of-control transactions in the last decade, and we structure every deal assuming the commissioner will ask the hard questions.

We do not chase Fortune 500 outbound M&A. Clients who need a hundred-lawyer team for a strategic acquisition belong at a different firm, and we will say so. What the Corporate group does well is represent the seller whose business is the product of thirty years of work, the founder who wants to keep employees intact after closing, and the PE buyer who needs a Connecticut firm that will return the call on Friday night when a closing condition goes sideways.