Sarah P. Payne

In the last few years Payne has represented clients involved in complex cross-border transactions connected to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s initial public offering, the largest in the history in U.S. financial markets.

Payne represented the underwriters in the big deal, which raised proceeds of $25 billion, making it the largest technology company IPO in history worldwide. Alibaba provides similar services to those offered by Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc. In recent years, Alibaba has outsold all U.S. retailers combined. That metric includes American brick and mortar shops, not just online sales.

Payne has also been involved in a novel transaction that stemmed from the IPO. She advised SoftBank Group Corp. and a subsidiary as they subsequently sold off some of their holdings in Alibaba Group, using securities that give the seller three years to decide whether they want to pay out in cash or convert the securities into standard Alibaba shares.

"It was the second largest mandatorily exchangeable securities transaction ever," she said. "Those transactions are fairly rare. It was a very interesting deal to work on."

Softbank, a multinational telecommunications and tech corporation, sold $6.6 billion in mandatorily exchangeable securities and $3.4 billion in traditional Alibaba shares. Some of the shares were actually sold back to Alibaba itself.

In addition to working these massive securities deals, Payne is co-head of Sullivan & Cromwell's capital markets group and the technology M&A and finance group.

On the M&A side of her practice, Payne recently helped Insight Enterprises Inc., a publicly traded information technology company, complete its acquisition of Datalink Corp., a deal valued at around $257.5 million. Datalink is also an information technology company, focused on helping companies optimize their use of cloud computing.

"It represented an opportunity for them to take a significant step in strengthening their data center practice," she said.

— Joshua Sebold