Bio

Stephen Gierasch practices in the McNees Corporate & Tax Group and is an experienced mergers and acquisitions attorney and trusted legal advisor to businesses and executives throughout Pennsylvania and beyond. As a leading mergers and acquisitions attorney, Steve has successfully led numerous clients through mergers and acquisitions, sales and other strategic ventures — whether as lead attorney for sellers, buyers and investors or as local counsel for publicly-traded companies acquiring Pennsylvania-based businesses. In the Pennsylvania corporate M&A community, Steve is widely-regarded as a “deal maker” who combines a keen sense of client objectives with an instinct for finding compromise, all with the aim of getting deals done. In fact, in recent years, Steve has twice been named the “M&A Attorney of the Year” by The Best Lawyers in America, both in 2020 and 2022. All of Steve’s extraordinary M&A experience, has enabled him to be a “go-to” founder’s advisor helping founders identify strategic exit options, engage in pre-transaction planning, evaluating investment banking needs and navigating the transaction process to its successful conclusion. To that end, over the last several years, Steve and his team have successfully closed over 100 transactions involving a liquidity event for founders, whether through “all-out” sales or partial sales to private equity firms. In addition to his M&A practice, Steve often serves as primary outside general counsel to those companies with limited or no in-house legal capabilities. Given his reputation of having a unique combination of legal and business strategy skills, Steve sits on Boards of Directors and Advisory Boards for leading Pennsylvania businesses. Active in the community, Steve is the immediate past Chair of the Whitaker Center’s Board of Directors and is a founding board member of the Keystone Mergers & Acquisition Council. In addition, since 2014, Steve has been a member of Vistage.