Bio

Elina Tetelbaum is a Corporate Partner at Wachtell Lipton, where she focuses on shareholder and hedge fund activism defense and preparedness, proxy fights, takeover defense, corporate governance, and mergers and acquisitions. Ms. Tetelbaum has been named a Dealmaker of the Year by The American Lawyer, one of The Deal’s Top Women in Dealmaking, a Law360 Rising Star for M&A, and one of the 500 Leading Dealmakers in America by Lawdragon, among other honors. She regularly counsels boards and management teams in navigating, resolving and prevailing in activist situations, proxy fights and M&A contests, and frequently lectures and publishes on corporate governance and M&A. Ms. Tetelbaum has advised both public and private companies in a wide range of industries in mergers and acquisitions, including Allergan in its $83 billion acquisition by AbbVie, PDC Energy in its $7.6 billion acquisition by Chevron and successful proxy fight defense against Kimmeridge, Forest Laboratories, Inc. in its $28 billion acquisition by Actavis plc. and in successive proxy contests with Carl Icahn, and AbbVie in its $21 billion acquisition of Pharmacyclics. Ms. Tetelbaum has extensive expertise advising companies in response to unsolicited takeover offers, including National Instruments in its $8.2 billion acquisition by Emerson following its unsolicited offer, Kansas City Southern in its unsolicited transaction with Canadian National Railway and $31 billion acquisition by Canadian Pacific Railway, Dorian LPG in its response to the $1.1 billion unsolicited proposal by BW LPG, and Vulcan Materials Company in its response to the $4.7 billion unsolicited offer by Martin Marietta Materials. Ms. Tetelbaum received an A.B. magna cum laude in Economics from Harvard University and completed a J.D. from Yale Law School, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Journal on Regulation and editor of the Yale Law Journal. After law school, Ms. Tetelbaum served as a law clerk to the Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Ms. Tetelbaum is the President of the Stuyvesant High School Alumni Association, an Advisory Board Member of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, and a Board Member of the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate law. Previously, she served as secretary to the Corporation Law Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York and Secretary of the First Generation Harvard Alumni.