Stephen Halperin

Steve Halperin serves as counsel at Goodmans after more than 30 years as a partner and more than 20 years as a member of the Executive Committee. He is a past Co-Chair of the firm’s corporate securities group.  His practice has for many years been focused upon transactional corporate and securities law, with particular emphasis on domestic and international corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions and corporate governance (including activist shareholders) matters. Between late 2007 and early 2009, Steve acted as lead counsel to the Pan Canadian Investors Committee for Third-Party Asset Backed Commercial Paper, which initiated and successfully implemented the $32 billion restructuring of that market, the largest court supervised restructuring ever undertaken in Canada. 

Steve was peer-selected the Toronto Securities Lawyer of the Year in the 2020 edition of Best Lawyers in Canada. He has been selected three times as the Toronto Corporate Lawyer of the Year (most recently for 2019) and four times as Toronto Corporate Governance Lawyer of the Year (most recently for 2018) and as Toronto Mergers and Acquisitions Lawyer of the Year for 2017 by that publication. He was named as one of the top 30 corporate governance lawyers in the world in the 2018 edition of Euromoney’s Best of the Best and one of the top 30 mergers and acquisitions lawyers in the world in the 2017 edition of that publication and is the only Canadian to be so designated. He has previously been named as one of the world’s “top 30” in the separate categories of capital markets, mergers and acquisitions and corporate governance in other recent editions of that series. He was also designated as one of ten “most highly regarded individuals” in each of these three categories in the 2021 edition of Who’s Who Legal Canada and was recently recognized as one of two Canadians in Who's Who Legal: Global Elite Thought Leader - Governance 2022. Who’s Who Legal’s global 2016 survey ranked him as the only Canadian on its list of the seven “most highly regarded” North American M&A lawyers, describing him as “one of the finest lawyers in the world” in this practice area. Who’s Who Legal recognized him as one of two Canadian “Global Thought Leaders for Capital Markets” in its 2018 survey.

Steve was described by IFLR1000 as “one of the most experienced and respected M&A counsel in Canada”; was one of six lawyers profiled as “elite mergers and acquisitions lawyers” in The National Post (Canada); and one of seven lawyers profiled as the “Top M&A Lawyers in Canada” in The Daily Deal (USA). He is the only Canadian to have achieved the highest rating in Corporate/M&A in every edition of Chambers Global (UK) for the past 17 years. Chambers Global has described Steve as “a brilliant lawyer who is practical, knowledgeable and strategic,” “universally acknowledged to operate at the very top level”, a “go-to guy, particularly for complex, larger scale corporate finance and M&A” and “as good as it gets in Canada”. He has also consistently received the highest rating in various fields of corporate and securities law in several other Canadian and international survey based rating services.