Eric L Schiele

Practice Areas

Eric Schiele is a corporate partner in the New York office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP. His practice encompasses M&A and public company board and special committee advisory work, including hostile takeover and hedge fund activism defense. Over the course of his career, Eric has advised on announced M&A transactions with an aggregate value of well over $1 trillion.

Corporate clients that Eric has represented include, among others, AbbVie, Amcor, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Constellation Brands, Disney, DreamWorks Animation, Fox Corporation, GlaxoSmithKline, H.J. Heinz, Honeywell, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Kellanova, McDonald’s, Northrop Grumman, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, Taubman Centers, The Washington Post Company, Time Warner, Toll Brothers, Wynn Resorts, Xerox, Yahoo! and Zale Corporation. He also has extensive experience in hedge fund activism defense, including against, among others, Carl Icahn, Elliot Management, Greenlight Capital, Relational, Starboard Value and Trian.

Eric is a frequent speaker on M&A topics, including co-chairing PLI’s Hot Topics in Mergers and Acquisitions conferences from 2014–2021 and chairing its Shareholder Activism conference in 2016 and co-chairing it in 2018 and 2019.

Personal

University of Texas School of Law (J.D., with Highest Honors, 2000); Ohio Wesleyan University (B.A., summa cum laude, 1996)