M&A In 2020 And Trends For 2021

2020 brought the COVID-19 pandemic and other headline-grabbing challenges, along with "the usual" quadrennial questions around the U.S. election. Early in the year, businesses and dealmakers focused on the pandemic and revised their strategies as understanding of its impact evolved. The M&A market, like the overall economy, was hit hard, before rebounding later in the year.

In this alert, we look at some of the ways M&A changed in 2020, particularly those changes likely to continue into 2021.

Deal Activity Rebounds Quickly

Unsurprisingly, M&A activity reached record lows in early 2020, as the pandemic encircled the globe and companies acted to protect their personnel and businesses and faced an unprecedented reality of closures, social distancing and other restrictions. Companies reacted quickly though, getting back to potential deals that had been put on hold and moving on new deals. Dealmakers applied new tools and processes to an almost exclusively