Jennifer Bellah Maguire is a partner in Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s Los Angeles office and is co-chair to the firm’s investment fund group. Her practice focuses on private equity fund formation and mergers and acquisitions, including public company transactions and divestitures. Chambers Global: The World’s Leading Lawyers for Business has recognized her as a leading lawyer from 2012-2015 in the area of Private Equity: Buyouts and from 2012-2013 in the areas of Investment Funds: Private Equity: Fund Formation. Currently and for the past several years, Chambers USA has recognized her as a leading lawyer in the areas of Private Equity: Fund Formation and Buyouts, in California Corporate M&A: Private Equity and in Southern California Corporate M&A. She was shortlisted for the Chambers USA ‘Women in Law’ Awards in the Corporate M&A Lawyer of the Year category, 2012. She has also been named as one of the “Most Influential M&A Advisors” (2013) and ranked among “The Best of the Bar” for Corporate Transactions (2007) by The Los Angeles Business Journal. Bellah Maguire has been selected by her peers for inclusion in 2006-2016 editions of The Best Lawyers in America© in the fields of Securities/Capital Markets Law and was named to the International Who’s Who of Private Fund Lawyers for 2011.
She has represented a number of groups in raising leveraged buy-out, venture and other funds, including the $6 billion leveraged buy-out fund raised by Leonard Green & Partners in 2012. Her going private experience includes the sale of SPARTA and the acquisition of The Sports Authority.
Bellah Maguire holds a bachelor of arts from Bryn Mawr College, magna cum laude, and studied for one year at Sorbonne University in Paris, France. She was awarded a Watson Foundation Fellowship following college. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she was a member of the Order of the Coif and served as an Associate Editor for the California Law Review. She speaks and writes French fluently and practiced in the firm’s Paris office. Prior to joining the firm, she served as law clerk for the Honorable Mary M. Schroeder in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Bellah Maguire is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Otis College of Art and Design and a founding member of the board of the Los Angeles Ballet.