Sarah P. Payne

Capital Markets; M&A; Corporate Governance

Managing partner of S&C’s Palo Alto office, Co-head of the Capital Markets Group. Broad-based corporate practice advising clients on a wide range of transactions, focusing on capital markets, M&A and venture capital and other private investments. Named to the Daily Journal’s “Top Women Lawyers,” a list of the most powerful lawyers in California; recognized for Capital Markets, esp. Technology by Lawdragon 500 Leading Dealmakers; listed as a “Rising Star” in M&A by IFLR1000 and as a “Rising Star in Finance” by Euromoney Legal Media Group. Her cutting edge work in SoftBank’s $20 billion monetization of its interest in T-Mobile earned “Most Innovative Deal of the Year” from The Deal. Recognized by The Times as “Lawyer of the Week” for her role advising the underwriters in Alibaba’s $25 billion IPO and NYSE listing. Other recent capital markets work includes advising SoftBank Group in the $5.2 billion IPO and Nasdaq listing of Arm Holdings, the largest global IPO of 2023, the underwriters in IPOs by Confluent, Levi Strauss & Co., Unity Software and Weave Communications and advising XPeng Inc. in its $1.8 billion Hong Kong IPO and U.S. offering, the first-ever dual-primary listing of a company that adopted a weighted voting rights structure on the HKSE. Recent M&A work includes advising Better HoldCo in its $6.9 billion acquisition by SPAC Aurora Acquisition Corp., Rent-A-Center in its acquisition of Acima Holdings and Joe Tsai in his acquisition of the Nets and Barclays Center, for which she was recognized as a “Power Player” by Sports Business Journal, as well as the purchase of the New York Liberty WNBA team, among others. Frequent speaker and author. Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School (“International Securities Regulation,” Spring 2019).

UC Berkeley School of Law (JD, 2001); Yale University (B.A., 1998).