Barbara L. Becker is a corporate partner in the New York office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and Co-Chair of Gibson Dunn’s Mergers and Acquisitions Practice Group. Ms. Becker served as a member of the firm-wide Executive Committee, and she is the New York Hiring Partner and the Chair of the firm-wide Diversity Committee.
Ms. Becker advises companies on all significant business and legal issues, including mergers and acquisitions (including domestic and cross-border), spin-offs, joint ventures and general corporate matters. Ms. Becker also advises boards of directors and special committees of public companies. Ms. Becker represents corporations and investment banks based in and outside of the United States. She also represents hedge funds and other investors in their M&A activities. Ms. Becker focuses on clients in the consumer/retail, technology, healthcare and industrial industries.
Highly regarded as one of the elite M&A lawyers in New York, Ms. Becker was named to Law360’s 2011 list of “Top Female Deal Makers,” which features the 10 leading female attorneys in the field of mergers and acquisitions. She is ranked as a top M&A lawyer by Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business, and is described as an “extraordinarily smart, hardworking and exceedingly practical attorney who has an incredibly good business sense.” In addition, she has been ranked in Best Lawyers in America and International Financial Law Review. For Ms. Becker’s representation of Kraft Foods, Inc. in its $19 billion acquisition of Cadbury, she was named The AmLaw Daily’s “Dealmaker of the Week” in January 2010. In 1996, Ms. Becker was named by Crain’s New York Business as one of its “Forty under Forty: New York’s New Generation of Leaders.” She is a former member of the Coro Foundation’s Leadership New York.
Ms. Becker’s corporate clients include Ancestry.com, AOL, Avnet, EMC, Iconix Brands, Infor/Lawson Software, News Corp, PepsiCo, Publicis Groupe and Tenet Healthcare, among others.
Ms. Becker’s investment bank clients include Barclays, Centerview, Citigroup, Evercore, Goldman Sachs, Lazard Frères, Perella Weinberg and UBS, among others.
Ms. Becker earned her Juris Doctor in 1988 from New York University School of Law. She received her undergraduate degree in 1985 from Wesleyan University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Ms. Becker is a member of the Board of Trustees of New York University School of Law.
