K&L Gates has hired a corporate/M&A partner who has advised companies on transformative mergers in a series of in-house roles.
Kathryn Twiddy, who joins K&L Gates as a partner based in Raleigh, has devoted much of her career to advising life sciences and technology companies on transactions, licensing, compliance, and corporate governance. Twiddy is admitted to the bar in New York as well as North Carolina. Her past roles include serving as in-house counsel at IBM, chief legal officer, chief compliance officer, and corporate secretary at M*Modal, general counsel and corporate secretary at Misys Healthcare Systems, and general counsel and corporate secretary at LipoScience. Twiddy represented M*Modal in its $1.1 billion acquisition by One Equity Partners, the private investment division of JPMorgan Chase, in August 2012. During her tenure at LipoScience, Twiddy advised the company on its $85.3 million acquisition by Laboratory Corporation of America in November 2014.
“The overall atmosphere and forecast for M&A activity is up, and I felt it was a good time to reenter private practice. I’ve been lucky in that I’ve had in-house experience with global companies and cross-border transactions. I was looking for a firm that has a broad integrated international business platform,” Twiddy told IFLR1000.
“When I was general counsel, I found it easy to work with lawyers in outside firms who’d been in-house. They could see the world from my point of view, and I found them particularly efficient to work with. I hope to provide that sort of service for my clients,” she said.
Twiddy has had ample opportunity to develop her technical transactional expertise. When Twiddy was at IBM, her purview included representation of IBM software even though IBM was primarily a hardware company at the time, she said. Twiddy supported IBM software and worked primarily on general commercial and corporate transactions there, she recalled.
Twiddy earned both her bachelor's degree and her law degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.