Torrey J. McClary

As the world of health care transactions expands, McClary’s career has kept pace. After stints at prior law firms, she moved to King & Spalding LLP last year.

“I needed a platform in the health care space to do innovative transactions,” she said. “And that’s what King & Spalding brought: regulatory expertise, antitrust and litigation support. My clients have issues across the board, and I needed a firm where the partners are interested in supporting me.”

McClary’s two decades of mergers and acquisitions experience prepared her for a new kind of deal-making.

“My clients tend to be nonprofits and universities, and it’s not so common for all law firms to be conversant with that world,” she said. “Growth strategies are changing. It used to be one acquisition after another. That’s how systems grew. But in the last several years, there’s been this development in alternative transaction structures to grow and expand systems in a strategic and focused way.”

For example, McClary led King & Spalding’s representation of the University of California San Diego Health in a joint venture for cancer services with Eisenhower Medical Center in Riverside County.

“The parties had been working toward implementing the specifics of a master affiliation agreement for several years,” she said, when she and her team were retained to help the client memorialize and implement the affiliation’s first initiative.

The collaboration expands cancer services for residents of the Coachella Valley, linking Eisenhower’s Lucy Curci Cancer Center with UCSD Health’s Moores Cancer Center. That affords patients access to world class cancer care they would expect from UCSD without traveling to San Diego. The institutions inked a five-year affiliation agreement that began in January 2018. “It’s a strategic partnership as opposed to an across the board merger,” McClary said.

In another deal, she represented both Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center and Mercy Health System in structuring and negotiating a significant affiliation. It enables Ohio’s top academic health system and its largest community health system — now rebranded Bon Secours Mercy Health — in a “Healthy State Alliance” intended to address Ohio’s most critical health needs. There will be an initial focus on the state’s opioid addiction epidemic and on transplant and cancer programs.

“I was honored to be part of helping develop that joint approach,” McClary said.

She added that the evolution came slowly. “I realized that over 20 years the kind of stuff clients were starting to call me for was stuff that had never been done before. They were looking for someone to think creatively and still keep them legally compliant. It really kicked my practice to a new level. My clients are mission-driven, and they have brought me a more meaningful career than I ever expected.”

— John Roemer