Biography

Trevor Norwitz is a partner in the Corporate Department at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. He has counseled businesses in connection with mergers, acquisitions, investments, divestitures, hostile takeover bids and defenses, proxy contests, joint ventures, spinoffs, financing transactions, and corporate governance and crisis management matters.

Selected recent representations by Mr. Norwitz include: S&P Global in its $44 billion merger with IHS Markit (for which he was named an American Lawyer Dealmaker of the Year) and previously in S&P’s separation and sale of McGraw Hill Education, its joint venture with CME Group to form S&P/Dow Jones Indices, and several acquisitions); Whole Foods in its sale to Amazon.com; Medivation in its sale to Pfizer; Dollar Tree in its contested acquisition of Family Dollar; eBay in its spinoff of PayPal; numerous acquisitions for, among others, AT&T, Ventas, Novartis and Danaher; and activist campaign defenses for, among others, Dollar Tree, Whole Foods, eBay, Bed Bath & Beyond and McGraw Hill.

Mr. Norwitz teaches an M&A class at Columbia Law School since 2004. He is immediate past chair of the New York City Bar M&A Committee, serves on committees of the American Bar Association and the International Bar Association, and was part of an international advisory group to the South African government on company law reform. He is a regular speaker and panelist at professional conferences, and contributor to professional publications, on topics relating to M&A and corporate governance. He is also active in pro bono and non-profit activities, including chairing the University of Cape Town Fund and Friends of Ikamva Labantu, and serving on the boards of DirectWomen and the Bernstein Institute of Human Rights at NYU Law School. 

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Mr. Norwitz received his Bachelor of Business Science from the University of Cape Town. On a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, he read law at Keble College, before completing an LL.M. at Columbia.