Advising a consortium led by Blackstone Inc. (BX) on the $17 billion purchase of a controlling interest in Refinitiv, the financial and risk business of Thomson Reuters Corp. (TRI), in 2018 was a transformative transaction for Elizabeth A. Cooper, she said on this week’s Drinks With The Deal podcast.

“It was a deal that had everything: a carveout, a purchase price adjustment, a long license agreement, regulatory approvals,” said Cooper, the global head of private equity at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP in New York.

Cooper spent weeks with the Blackstone deal team negotiating the transaction in person, which helped her develop key relationships at the client, where one of her mentors at Simpson Thacher, John G. Finley, has been the chief legal officer since 2010. And the experience allowed Cooper to see “how the deal team made decisions, how involved they were, their approach to the transaction.”

Advising Blackstone on the purchase of a stake in Refinitiv and its $27 billion sale to London Stock Exchange Group plc, which was announced on Aug. 1, 2019, and closed 18 months later, also helped Cooper transition to a leadership role at her firm.

“That was the first deal where I started to build a team that is still with me today,” she said, a process that she discussed on the podcast. And she talked about advising Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. on the sale of its investment banking business to Barclays plc (BCS) at the start of the financial crisis in September 2008.

Listen to the podcast below:

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