News & Events

Simpson Thacher was named a Healthcare Practice Group of the Year for 2023 by Law360. The publication highlighted the Firm’s successes in major transactional and litigation matters affecting the healthcare space over the past year, including advising WeightWatchers in its $132 million acquisition of the telehealth platform Sequence, as well as guiding Change Healthcare and HCA Healthcare through antitrust challenges to transactions.

Simpson Thacher Healthcare Partner Vanessa Burrows told Law360 that WeightWatchers’ acquisition of Sequence exemplified a trend of growing interest in digital health companies. “[T]his is an area that we’ve seen increased interest in over the last number of years,” she said. The Firm’s ability to adapt to such emerging trends, as well as to other challenges and uncertainties in an evolving marketplace, was key to its success in 2023, according to Capital Markets Partner John Ericson: “The fact that there are these uncertainties actually can often play to our strengths because we work together across our different practice groups,” he said.

The victory for Change Healthcare marked a rare example of “litigating the fix,” or arguing at trial that purported competitive concerns in mergers are remedied by a voluntary measure undertaken by the parties—in this case, the divestiture of Change Healthcare’s ClaimsXten business. “There haven’t been many cases in which the merging parties have successfully litigated a fix like this in the past,” said Sara Razi, Global Co-Chair of the Firm’s Antitrust and Trade Regulation Practice, who led the team representing Change Healthcare. “And so this case demonstrates a nice playbook for how parties can do that.”

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