By Jennifer Henderson, From The Am Law Daily

Having edged out its competitors throughout the year on transactional work, Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom placed first in three separate, year-end global M&A rankings based on deal value.

Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton ranked the second highest on the lists put out by Mergermarket, Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg this week. Placing third were Sullivan & Cromwell for Mergermarket; Weil Gotshal & Manges for Thomson Reuters; and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett for Bloomberg.

Year-end deal value for Skadden came in at $594 billion, according to the Mergermarket report, marking a nearly 160 percent increase over 2013, when the firm ranked seventh on the Mergermarket and Reuters lists, and ninth on Bloomberg’s list. Davis Polk & Wardwell claimed the top spot in 2013 on the Mergermarket and Reuters lists, while Simpson Thacher held the number one ranking for Bloomberg.

Discrepancies between the rankings result from the use of different measures in compiling year-end values, as The Am Law Daily has previously reported.

In terms of deal volume, Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg ranked in unison, giving top marks to Jones Day, followed by Latham & Watkins and Kirkland & Ellis. DLA Piper replaced Jones Day in the number one spot on Mergermarket’s list, while second and third remained the same as Reuters and Bloomberg.

Overall global M&A deal value was up 47 percent to $3.5 trillion in 2014 from roughly $2.4 trillion in 2013, according to the Thomson Reuters report. The 2014 value is the highest since 2007, the report states.

Year-end data also shows the European M&A sector experiencing a decline in completed deals, according to Thomson Reuters, dropping 7.2 percent to $594 billion in 2014 from $629 billion in 2013. At the same time, Magic Circle firms struggled to keep up with U.S. firms in terms of completed deals by value, Legal Business reports.

Not surprisingly, top global M&A deals of 2014 include those proposed by Comcast and Time Warner valued at $68.5 billion, along with AT&T and DirecTV valued at $65.5 billion, Mergermarket data notes. Serving as legal advisers in those mega-deals, which helped boost their rankings, were Skadden for Time Warner and Simpson Thacher for the financial advisers to Comcast and DirecTV.

Both deals fall into the technology, media and telecom sector, which saw deal value grow to $604.2 billion in 2014 from $508.2 billion in 2013. On its heels in 2014 was the energy, mining and utilities sector, which saw its deal value jump to $632.5 billion in 2014 from $428.7 billion in 2013, according to Mergermarket.

Other major deals for Skadden in 2014, even though they failed to complete, include a $116 billion deal between Pfizer and AstraZeneca, in which Skadden represented Pfizer and Davis Polk and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer represented AstraZeneca, along with the Valeant Pharmaceutical Inc. and Allergan Inc. deal, in which Skadden represented Valeant alongside Sullivan & Cromwell and Hoskin & Harcourt and Latham represented Allergan.

Both those deals fall within the pharmaceutical, medical and biotechnology sector, which saw global deal value grow to $379.5 billion in 2014 from $175.7 billion in 2013, according to the Mergermarket report.

For more on this story go to: http://www.americanlawyer.com/id=1202714459878/Skadden-Once-Again-Steals-the-Show-in-MA-Rankings#ixzz3OTTxYXwJ