Steve Lipin is founder and chief executive officer of communications advisory firm Gladstone Place Partners and a trusted advisor in the field of strategic, financial and corporate governance communications. Steve has spent over 35 years at the intersection of the corporate world, Wall Street and the media, as a leading financial journalist and top communications strategist to C-Suites and boards of directors. Steve started Gladstone Place Partners in 2017 after 16 years at Brunswick Group, where he was U.S. Senior Partner responsible for the establishment and growth of the firm’s U.S. practice.
At Gladstone Place Partners, Steve has worked on assignments such as Take-Two Interactive’s $12.7 billion acquisition of Zynga, 3G’s $7.1 billion acquisition of Hunter Douglas, Acceleron Pharma’s $11.5 billion sale to Merck, Dunkin Brands’ $11 billion sale to Inspire Brands, The Walt Disney Company’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox assets, Churchill IV’s combination with Lucid Motors, as well as others. Steve has worked on many landmark M&A deals such as InBev’s acquisition of Anheuser-Busch, AB InBev’s acquisitions of Grupo Modelo and of SAB Miller, Air Liquide’s purchase of Airgas, Marriott International’s acquisition of Starwood, Burger King’s combination with Tim Horton’s, American Airlines’ sale to US Airways and many others.
He has also advised many companies on shareholder activist defense and shareholder engagements, including The Walt Disney Company with respect to Trian, Illumina with respect to Carl Icahn, as well as activist engagements for Duke Energy, Marriott, Heinz, PepsiCo, Yahoo!, Macy’s, AIG, Freeport-McMoRan and Arconic, among others.
Steve has guest lectured at Yale Law School, MIT Sloan School of Management, Penn Law School and others.
Before communications, Steve was Finance Editor for The Wall Street Journal, supervising the paper’s coverage of mergers, commercial banking, private equity and corporate finance, after five years as the M&A beat reporter. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and was a member of a team that won an Overseas Press Club award. He joined the Journal in 1991 to cover banking after stints at Institutional Investor and American Banker.
Born in New York City, Steve graduated from Boston College with a bachelor’s degree in Economics. He is a board member of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, the Columbia Journalism Review and of Youth INC. He has three children, including one who is in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy PhD program at Berkeley Law, and lives in New York City with his wife.
Education
Bachelors in Economics, Boston College (1985)
Steven Lipin is not teaching any Law courses in Spring 2025.
Courses During Other Semesters
| Semester | Course Num | Course Title |  Teaching Evaluations | Fall 2024 | 248.52 sec. 001 | M&A on the Ground: Hostiles, Proxy Fights and the M&A Ecosystem | View Teaching Evaluation |
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