Stephen Kotran

  • Lecturer in Law

Stephen M.  Kotran is a partner in the mergers and acquisitions and financial institutions groups at Sullivan & Cromwell, and a member of the firm’s managing partners’ committee. He represents buyers, sellers, and special committees of independent directors and financial advisors in connection with mergers and acquisitions transactions. This includes negotiated and hostile acquisitions of public companies, negotiated sales of private companies, subsidiaries and divisions, private equity transactions, leveraged buyouts, formation of joint ventures, and asset sales.

His clients have included American International Group, Inc., Cytec Industries, Inc., Eastman Kodak Company, Evercore Partners, Goldman, Sachs & Co., ING Groep N.V., Ipsen, S.A., Milacron LLC, Prudential Financial, Inc., Swiss Re, and Wells Fargo Securities LLC.

He has been recognized as a leading mergers and acquisitions and private equity lawyer by widely-referenced legal guides, including The Best Lawyers in America, Chambers, International Finance Law Review, Lawdragon, New York Super Lawyers, PLC and The US Legal 500.  

Kotran lecturers on mergers and acquisitions panels for the Practising Law Institute, the New York City Bar Association, the University of Texas School of Law’s Annual Mergers and Acquisitions Institute, the Annual Institute on Corporate, Securities and Related Aspects of Mergers and Acquisitions, and other professional organizations.

He has guest lectured at New York University Law School, the University of Virginia Law School, and Stanford University Law School. He is co-chair of the Financial Advisors Task Force and a member of the mergers and acquisitions committee of the business law section of the American Bar Association. He also serves on the mergers and acquisitions advisory board of the Practical Law Company.

Kotran earned his J.D. from the University of Virginia Law School, where he was an editor of the Virginia Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif. He holds an A.B. degree from Harvard College.

Kotran served as a legislative assistant to U.S. Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan in the mid-1980s and as a judicial clerk to the Honorable Edward R. Becker of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the early 1990s.