Earlier this month eight SGR attorneys acted as “legal advisors” to high school students from around the Southeast, including participants from Georgia, Tennessee and Mississippi, who participated in a weeklong mock M&A transaction competition sponsored by Youth About Business (YAB). The winners from the competition will have the chance to compete at YAB’s nationwide championship camp in New York the week of July 20 where the winners will receive real shares of a real public company.

The SGR attorneys included Marc Latman, Steve Rossum, Jonathan Minnen, John Ethridge, Nick Ivezaj, Steven Richman, Julie Sebastian and Jonathan Giesen.

YAB is a branded program (of Creating An Environment of Success, Inc., a 501(c)(3)) aimed at national youth leadership development through experiential learning about the business world.  For over 20 years now, YAB has been successful at turning high school students into both “college-ready” and professional “work-ready” young men and women.

The biggest program run by YAB is its “summer business camps” held in New York, Chicago and Atlanta each year.  The camps are designed to teach high school students from the respective regions about the world of mergers and acquisitions using an intensive, one-week, competitive and fun learning format.  Each high school team is comprised of  five to seven students  and there are 10 teams per camp. Every team is assigned an advising team made up of an attorney, investment banker and an accountant.  These advisors, along with HR executives, marketing executives and CTO/CIO’s provide the student teams with the tools and knowledge needed to negotiate an M&A transaction.  The student teams negotiate the terms of their transaction and then compete against the other “merged” teams to see which merged team negotiated the best, most fully understood the benefits of the merger to the “new” company and made the most impressive and polished presentation (written and oral) to a panel of volunteer judges.

SGR colleagues in the firm’s New York office will be busy during the month of July preparing their own groups of students for the YAB M&A competition.