22 www.lexpert.ca
Canadian Law Awards Canadian Law Awards
CHALLENGES ARE opportunities to ex-
cel. With M&A activity in Canada relatively
steady in 2022, as evidenced by more than
$388 billion in total value of 3,432 deals seen
in the full year and $70.9 billion in its busi-
est month, dealmakers had hope for a similar
growth in 2023 despite lingering uncertain-
ties over economic conditions.
Some prognosticators were not as optimis-
tic, with many warning that the country would
see a recession deeper than most advanced
economies for much of the year due to con-
tinuing geopolitical tensions, rising inflation,
higher interest rates, tighter credit markets,
and significantly reduced access to capital.
e predictions were not far off, with 2023
resulting in real domestic growth of 1.1 per-
cent and the economy narrowly avoiding a
technical recession. While the GDP statistics
outpace the 0.8 percent estimate of analysts,
2023 is still marked as the slowest year of ex-
pansion since 2016, outside of the height of
COVID-19 in 2020.
Still, Canada remains home to attractive
LEXPERT'S
2024 AWARDS
OF EXCELLENCE
FOR TOP DEALS
THESE 22 DEALS, COMPILED BY KIEZZSA CRUZ AND MA. CARLEEN
BONGAT AND SELECTED BY LEXPERT'S EDITORIAL AND RESEARCH
TEAMS, SHOW HOW LAW FIRMS AND BUSINESSES REMAINED
ACTIVE AMID ECONOMIC UNCERTAINTY
assets and resilient dealmakers, and those
named Excellence Awardees prove that
M&A in Canada can rise above even the
trickiest of situations.
is year, Lexpert has named 22 deals in five
categories (capital markets, infrastructure and
project financing, insolvency and restructur-
ing, mid-market deals, and overall M&A deal
of the year) as Excellence Awardees, picked
from dozens of submissions sent by legal pro-
fessionals across Canada.
e next step is for the shortlisted Excel-
lence Awardee deals to go to a panel of judges
to choose a final winner in each category. We
will then honour our Excellence Awardees
and announce a winner in each deal catego-
ry (along with our awards for non-deal cat-
egories) at an in-person gala on May 9 at the
Liberty Grand in Toronto. It's the third in-
person event for the CLA since Lexpert cre-
ated the awards in 2020 (when COVID-19
temporarily stopped face-to-face mingling).
Here are this year's Excellence Awardees.
Good luck to all.
Coming up with this year's Excellence
Awardees involved a rigorous, expert-in-
formed process. The Canadian Law
Awards editorial and research teams
reviewed all the submissions and con-
sulted third-party information to iden-
tify each category's standouts. A large,
independent external judging panel will
judge these shortlisted submissions,
scoring them against these criteria: the
financial value of the deal; the degree
to which it advanced legal and finan-
cial techniques and structures; how it
spanned jurisdictions, practice areas,
and industries; and whether the deal
involved groundbreaking original legal
strategies and structures. Through an
aggregation of the judges' scoring, a
process independently verified through
an audit by PwC, a final winner will be
chosen from each category. Winners
will be announced during an in-person
event set for May 9.
