Daniel B. Higgins

Higgins, a partner in Dentons' national health care practice group, said he owes his career to having dropped out of college, getting drafted and finding himself a staff sergeant leading small unit combat teams in Vietnam for the army's elite 173 Airborne Brigade. When he was seriously wounded and evacuated to a MASH unit, a surgeon narrowly saved his legs. Months in hospitals followed.

"I became a student of medicine, went to law school and came out with a strong interest in health care," he said.

His expertise in corporate, M&A and finance work was behind the megamerger between client Dignity Health, based in San Francisco, and Englewood, Colorado-based Catholic Health Initiatives, a deal that closed in January 2019. It produced a new $29 billion nonprofit health system called CommonSpirit Health based in Chicago.

"This deal came at the apex of the health care merger era," Higgins said, pointing out that more recent attempted system-to-system unions did not work out. CommonSpirit has 142 hospitals, 150,000 employees and more than 700 care sites in 21 states. Thirty of the hospitals are in California.

Along with being one of the largest M&A transactions closing in 2019, the deal involved unique challenges -- such integrating a Catholic and a non-Catholic hospital in a single system using an innovative organizational structure that required approval from the Vatican. Higgins and his team also needed numerous regulatory approvals from authorities ranging from the Federal Trade Commission, the California attorney general and hundreds of licensing agencies.

The outcome has been satisfactory, Higgins said.

"We made this giant investment around IT. Along with economies of scale, you also get a better sense of data-driven best practices."

Higgins helped design the new system, participated in the related negotiations and managed 46 separate corporate, finance and regulatory workstreams needed to complete the transaction. He organized and led a national team of more than 40 Dentons professionals in eight offices. The entire deal took more than two years.

And then there was the financing. Representing the new CommonSpirit Health, Higgins led a Dentons team in securing consolidation of the $13 billion in debt the system incurred. He accomplished it through a complex multi-jurisdictional refinancing of $6.4 billion of tax-exempt debt, representing the single largest tax-exempt bond financing in U.S. history.

"We had co-obligated groups that didn't always mesh perfectly," Higgins said. "A huge amount of planning went into the consolidation. You work so hard that the end is a little anticlimactic. Everyone collapses. Just too exhausted for the celebratory dinners of the old days. But it's a professional accomplishment I'm very proud of. It was the most exciting deal of my career."

-- John Roemer