Trevor Norwitz is Of Counsel at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.  During his 30 years at the Firm (25 as a partner) his practice focused primarily on mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance and securities law matters.  He advised public and private entities in a wide variety of industries in connection with mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, hostile takeover bids and defenses, proxy contests, joint ventures, financing transactions and corporate governance matters.

Selected representations by Mr. Norwitz have included:  S&P Global in its $44 billion merger with IHS Markit, for which he was named a Dealmaker of the Year by American Lawyer magazine (and previously in its separation and sale of McGraw Hill Education, its joint venture with CME Group to form S&P/Dow Jones Indices, and several acquisitions); Whole Foods in its sale to Amazon.com and its response to shareholder activism; Dollar Tree in its contested acquisition of Family Dollar Stores and responses to shareholder activism; eBay in connection with a proxy contest by Carl Icahn, and its spinoff of PayPal, Inc.; AerojetRocketdyne in its sale to L3Harris; and numerous transactions for, among other clients, AT&T, Ventas, Novartis, Danaher Corporation, and Creative Artists Agency.

Mr. Norwitz has since 2004 been teaching a class in Mergers and Acquisitions at Columbia University School of Law (and is also currently teaching at the Oxford University Law Faculty).  He is Co-Chair of the Securities and Capital Markets Committee of the International Bar Association and serves on the American Bar Association’s Task Force on Antisemitism.  He is a former chair of the New York City Bar Committee on Mergers and Acquisitions and Corporate Control Contests, a member of the American Law Institute, and served as a member of an international advisory group to the South African government on company law reform.  A regular speaker and panelist at professional conferences, he has chaired and participated in numerous continuing legal education programs and contributes regularly to professional publications on topics relating to M&A and corporate governance.

Mr. Norwitz also serves or has served on the boards of several not-for-profit organizations, including Friends of Ikamva Labantu (which he co-founded in the 1990’s to support grassroots development work in the South African townships), DirectWomen, Advancing Human Rights, and the Bernstein Institute of Human Rights at NYU Law School.   He chaired the University of Cape Town Fund from 2003 to 2023.

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Mr. Norwitz received his Bachelor of Business Science (Law) with first class honors from the University of Cape Town.  On a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, he read law at Keble College, graduating with first class honors before proceeding to take LLM degree at Columbia University.