Ropes & Gray guides on healthcare services company acquisition. Published on 30/10/2026 The acquisition will broaden patient access to a variety of surgical and care facilities across the US. Global law firm Ropes & Gray has advised healthcare services business Surgery Partners on its acquisition by healthcare company HealthSpan Partners for $5.7 billion, the firm announced this week. The Ropes & Gray advisory team included M&A partners Thomas Holden and Suni Sreepada and counsel Nicholas Roper, finance partner Byung Choi, antitrust partner Jonathan Klarfel,d and litigation and enforcement partner Martin Crisp. McDermott Will & Schulte also acted as legal counsel to Surgery Partners. With offices in California, HealthSpan offers diversified healthcare services. The company is affiliated with Cincinnati, Ohio-based non-profit Catholic health system Bon Secours Mercy Health. The company provides accessible care to patients at various health care settings. Brentwood, Tennessee-headquartered Surgery Partners is short-stay surgical facility owner and operator, offering a differentiated outpatient delivery model for surgical and related ancillary care. It operates over 200 locations across 30 states such as ambulatory surgery centres, multi-speciality physician practices, surgical hospitals and urgent care facilities. Following the acquisition, HealthSpan and Surgery Partners will together establish a major outpatient surgical care platform, expanding HealthSpan's outpatient surgery sector presence and facilitating a greater level of patient care across a wider variety of settings. Under the terms of the all-cash acquisition, funds advised by Bain Capital are set to roll over, with the firm retaining a significant interest in Surgery Partners. Following completion, Surgery Partners will become a privately held company, retaining its name, brand and headquarters. It will remain a secular organisation as opposed to a Catholic ministry entity. Surgery Partners CEO Eric Evans said of the transaction: "We are proud of the role Surgery Partners plays in expanding access to high-quality outpatient care. Joining HealthSpan Partners represents an exciting next chapter for Surgery Partners. Together, along with our physician and health system partners, we can expand on our mission to enhance patient quality of life through partnership. Importantly, HealthSpan Partners recognises the significant value that our physician partners and our colleagues have created for the communities we serve. We believe this transaction represents the best path forward for Surgery Partners, delivering an attractive all-cash premium to our shareholders while creating lasting benefits for our patients, physicians and other stakeholders." President of HealthSpan and of clinical operations at Bon Secours Mercy Health Dr. Wael Haidar commented: "Patients increasingly expect healthcare to be accessible, convenient and centred around their needs. Our purpose is to make healthcare easier to access, easier to navigate and better for the people we serve. As more care moves beyond the hospital setting, patients are looking for high-quality care that fits more seamlessly into their lives. Surgery Partners understands that care should be designed around the needs of patients, and that approach aligns closely with our mission. Together, we have an opportunity to expand access to high-quality outpatient care while supporting physicians and helping patients receive the right care, in the right setting, at the right time." HealthSpan took financial from Jefferies LLC advice (which also acted as sole initial underwriter in support of the acquisition) and legal counsel from Paul, Weiss, while McGuireWoods served as healthcare regulatory counsel and Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher as strategic communications advisor. Surgery Partners sought financial advice from Centerview Partners (lead) while Moelis & Company provided financial guidance to the Special Committee (which led transaction negotiations and unanimously recommended that the transaction go ahead) and Goodwin Procter gave legal counsel. Strategic communications advice was provided by FTI Consulting, Inc. Bain Capital took financial advice from Barclays and J.P. Morgan and legal advice from Kirkland & Ellis. The transaction is subject to regulatory and Surgery Partners shareholder approval as well as customary closing conditions and is set to complete in the first quarter of 2027. Related firms. Related publications.

How Ropes & Gray is developing AI for transactional diligence. Law firm Ropes & Gray is partnering with OpenAI to develop a proprietary AI tool for transactional diligence, compressing contract review from weeks into hours and allowing lawyers to focus on high-value strategic judgment. LearnAI Tools October 29, 2026 How Ropes & Gray is developing AI for transactional diligence Law firm Ropes & Gray is developing a transactional diligence AI tool in partnership with OpenAI. In transactional diligence, lawyers need to work through large volumes of documents under tight deadlines. Ropes & Gray was an early adopter of AI in the legal industry, and in partnership with OpenAI, they are now developing a proprietary AI tool to provide more expertise to more clients. "AI is really one of the key ways - if not the only way - to make sure you can maintain the same quality and consistency of advice while moving at a faster pace." - Josh Lichtenstein, Partner and Head of ERISA Fiduciary Practice, Ropes & Gray Building a first pass for commercial contract diligence Before finalizing any acquisition, the buyer must carry out a thorough investigation to validate the seller's financial and legal claims. That process of transactional diligence uncovers risks and liabilities, requiring data-heavy research that usually involves an entire team of lawyers. From parsing through an enormous number of documents to analyzing patterns, putting together a bid on a short timeline can take days of intensive work. To help their lawyers help their clients move more quickly, Ropes & Gray developed a transactional diligence AI tool with OpenAI. "It's enabling all the lawyers at our firm to actually get to what we're supposed to be doing," says Howard Glazer, the Partner and Head of Practice AI at Ropes & Gray. "Our clients don't pay us to review contracts. They pay us to make judgments based on what's in the contracts." LearnAI Tools The new diligence AI tool takes a first pass by combing through thousands of pages, identifying relevant documents and automatically grouping them together based on themes and issues. Along with the research, the tool produces summaries and a completed report in Ropes & Gray's signature format. It inventories and categorizes a data room, so it can review full relationships, not isolated documents. Of course, lawyers can inspect the grouping and categorization to confirm nothing is missed. The initial development work has focused on material commercial contracts. In working sessions, Ropes & Gray's lawyers compared test outputs with human-authored diligence reports from completed deals, then refined the rubric and report format based on what the drafts got right and where they fell short. Ropes & Gray designed the tool with a consistent query and framework that mimics the exact steps their team would take, from initial reviews to summaries to higher-level reviews. Comparable to the work of a capable junior-to-mid-level associate, this tool gives their firm consistently high-quality work that serves as a first pass through the process. "Our lawyers still need to review everything," says Lichtenstein. "Because anything that we're going to deliver to a client, we need to be able to stand behind 100%. This is why the tool is designed to allow lawyers to easily review interim summaries and actual documents." With the initial review taken care of, lawyers can spend more time reviewing and refining the work, resulting in a more carefully crafted final judgment. Applying AI to complex transactions Ropes & Gray has publicly described an ambition for the tool to produce a detailed, issue-level diligence report in hours rather than weeks. LearnAI Tools Results at a glance: * The tool inventories and categorizes a data room, grouping related documents by themes and issues. * The workflow produces summaries and a report in Ropes & Gray's format. * Lawyers review interim summaries and source documents before delivering work to clients. * Testing compares draft outputs with lawyer-authored diligence reports to refine the rubric and report format. Leadership lessons Lichtenstein and Glazer offer two lessons from their experience with AI: * Experiment with using AI for everything. * Put the clients first. What's next While today, AI is helping Ropes & Gray with legal diligence, Glazer believes that the next stage of AI will help create collective knowledge within the firm. With 340 partners and 1,500 lawyers, Ropes & Gray sees value in creating access to every person's knowledge, from their client meetings to past projects, to better solve client problems.