Bio

Michele Vaillant offers strategic counseling to business clients on their most sophisticated matters. Michele Vaillant counsels business entities throughout their various stages of development and negotiates and directs the documentation of a myriad of business and corporate finance transactions. Her representation includes corporate transactions, including mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, financing transactions, securities matters, commercial transactions and general corporate matters. Michele’s M&A practice includes the negotiation of mergers, acquisitions and divestitures of both private and public companies. Among Michele’s recent transactions are the representation of a leading data analytics provider in over a dozen acquisitions and divestitures ranging in price from under $100 million to over $800 million, representation of the largest swimming pool manufacturer worldwide in a series of acquisitions and divestitures of entities in the U.S., Australia, Canada, France and Spain having a wide range of values, representation of Stewardship Financial Corporation, a New Jersey community bank, in its merger with Columbia Financial, Inc. valued at approximately $135 million, and the sale of the largest independent U.S. beauty products distributor to L’Oréal Group. Michele works extensively with public companies and their senior management in addressing securities matters and regulatory issues such as compliance with ongoing periodic and current reporting obligations under the federal securities laws and with the requirements of the various exchanges. She advises clients with respect to proxy solicitations and the conduct of stockholders’ meetings and counsels corporate boards, board committees and executive management on a full range of corporate governance matters, including director fiduciary duties and board responsibilities, generally and in connection with extraordinary corporate transactions, board composition, structure and processes, executive compensation issues and shareholder initiatives. In other transactional areas, she is involved in complex corporate collaborations such as product and technology licensing, development, manufacturing and distribution arrangements as well as other strategic alliances, in some cases accompanied by equity investments. Her corporate finance experience includes capital raising activities such as private placements, public offerings and PIPE transactions. Michele’s clients span various market sectors, including manufacturing, information technology, financial institutions, life sciences, biotechnology, construction and retail. In addition to her areas of focus, Michele provides general corporate representation to her clients and, working with a multi-disciplinary team of McCarter & English attorneys, she assists clients with labor and employment issues such as compensation matters and employee benefits, protecting and securing intellectual property rights, tax matters and risk management. Michele is a member of the firm’s Partnership Selection Committee and Professional Personnel Committee.