Nathaniel "Tani" Weiner

San Francisco

Behavioral Health Law, Corporate & Transactions

In just the last two years, Nathaniel Weiner closed 20 corporate sales, acquisitions and investment deals for behavioral health companies.

The deals ranged from representing two family-office investment groups as each acquired separate multistate substance-abuse-treatment providers to overseeing the auction process to sell a provider of mental health and addiction treatment programs to a private equity-owned national provider.

Weiner says Polsinelli's behavioral health law group, which he co-chairs, is skilled in representing both buyers and sellers. "We have the buy and the sell tool kit that makes us conversant in understanding the perspective from each side," he said.

"It is the combination of experience and insight into this business that makes us a go-to firm for many of the players in this space."

Another of the transactions he worked on last year was described by a business publication as one of the deals that defined behavioral health investment in 2022. He represented longtime client Monte Nido & Affiliates, one of the largest national providers of eating disorder treatment programs and facilities, in its sale to Revelstoke PE for a reported $725 million.

"It was a fairly complex transaction," he said. Among other reasons, it involved operations in 15 states.

"A lot of these deals are bespoke in terms of the complexities of the issues and where the focus points are," Weiner said.

In another big deal, he was lead counsel for Acacia Counseling and Wellness, which provides mental health and telehealth programs in colleges in California and Minnesota, when it was acquired last summer by MindPath Health, which owns psychiatry and therapy practices across much of the country.

One regular client runs substance abuse treatment centers across the country. Since he first began representing the company in 2016, he has helped it acquire 18 other companies in nine states as well as open new treatment centers, he said.

Weiner was a corporate M&A attorney 20 years ago, advising a company in what was then called "the troubled teen industry." That company, Aspen Educational Group, hired him as its chief legal counsel, and he stayed on as deputy general counsel when Aspen was acquired by a large substance abuse treatment company called CRC Health Group. He stayed in-house when CRC was acquired by the publicly traded Acadia Healthcare in 2015 but left when the headquarters moved to Tennessee.

By now, many of the executives he worked with in-house have moved on to top spots at other behavioral health companies, and some of them still come to him for legal support, he said.

"My practice involves serving providers [and] serving investors [to] support legally their efforts to provide this critical level of health care," Weiner said.

-- Don DeBenedictis