Torrey J. McClary

LOS ANGELES - Torrey J. McClary is a Ropes & Gray LLP partner focused on health care transaction law. She moved to the firm in 2021 from a partnership at King & Spalding LLP and assisted in the opening of Ropes & Gray's new Los Angeles office in June 2022.
"Ropes had been thinking about opening a Los Angeles office for a long time, and health care was a key strategic objective," she said. "The combination of me and my team coming on board led to the dream scenario of making this happen. Now I'm leading the West Coast effort to build our health care transaction practice."
In a major career accomplishment, McClary is lead transaction counsel in the structuring and negotiating of a strategic alliance between Atrium Health of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama and Advocate Aurora Health of Wisconsin and Illinois. It was the largest health provider consolidation deal announced so far in 2022, and it is designed to create one of the nation's largest nonprofit health care systems with $27 billion in combined revenues and 67 hospitals across six states serving five million patients. The combined enterprise will employ more than 7,600 doctors, 41,000 nurses and 148,000 total employees.
After months of work, the parties are currently seeking approvals from regulators. The deal creates a joint operating company with no asset transfers. A single board of directors and one executive team will lead the combined operation, which will operate under the brand Advocate Health, with headquarters in Charlotte, N.C.
"Being given the opportunity to manage a transaction of this complexity and scale was a major honor," McClary said. It meant a lot that our team was trusted with the responsibility to hand such an important transaction for Atrium."
She credited colleagues at Atrium for bringing the deal together. "They have a very experienced, very smart in-house team," McClary said. "You're walking into a situation with an A-team already in place."
First came the broad contours of the new organization. McClary explained: "The heavy lift at the outset was to propose a structure that gets both parties' goals accomplished. We came up with a joint operating agreement that creates coordination at a system level."
McClary recalled "a scramble on Mother's Day" by a team of outside and in-house transaction counsel -- all mothers -- to finalize the deal documents. "We're saving our celebration until the final close," she said.