Emily O. Roberts 

Emily O. Roberts is a Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP partner in the firm’s corporate practice. She advises issuers and investment banks on capital markets transactions, such as Uber Technologies, Inc.’s $8.1 billion IPO in 2019.

She worked on the Davis Polk team advising Uber’s underwriters. The transactions teams earned a Daily Journal 2020 CLAY Award.

Roberts joined Davis Polk in 2011 directly after graduating from Stanford Law School. Before that, she’d spent two years with the investment portfolio management and advisory firm Cambridge Associates.

After a slowdown in deal-making in 2022, “Things are on the upswing now as interest rates changes level off and there’s less uncertainty about the direction we’re headed,” she said.

Another brief stumbling block was the 2023 bank crashes in mid-March. “The Silicon Valley Bank mini-crisis put a pause on capital market transactions,” Roberts said in late May, just days before politicians in Washington announced a tentative deal on the debt ceiling deadline.

“If we get that resolved, a lot of companies will be looking at an open window for financing as we move into summer.”

In November 2022, Roberts led the corporate team that advised Equinix Inc., an internet connection and data center services company, as an issuer, in connection with its SEC-registered offering program. That deal involved $1.5 billion; in April 2022, she advised on an earlier offering of $1.2 billion in green bonds that will be due in 2032.

Also in 2022, Roberts spoke at a conference to present the “David Polk & Wardwell De-SPAC Bootcamp” to discuss the steps a private company must take in order to go public via a merger with a Special Purpose Acquisition Company. So-called SPACs are investment vehicles created to raise capital through IPOs.

During the transaction-heavy 2021, Roberts co-led the Davis Polk team that advised luxury electric automaker Lucid Group in connection with its $24 billion business combination with Churchill Capital Corp. IV, a publicly traded SPAC.

CCIV and Lucid combined at a transaction enterprise value of $11.75 billion; the deal included a $2.5 billion fully committed private investment in public equity (PIPE) component, which at the time of its announcement made it the largest common stock PIPE for a SPAC transaction.

That gave the combined company a combined pro forma equity value of $24 billion. Roberts and her colleagues finalized the very complex merger agreement in just 43 days.

She noted that since then, SPAC mergers are on the wane. “They were a phenomenon, but interest is dropping off these days,” Roberts said.

— Devon Belcher