Kirkland & Ellis and Mayer Brown have been called in for Boeing’s sale of parts of its digital aviation unit to Thoma Bravo, in an all-cash deal valued at $10.55bn. 

Kirkland is acting for longtime client Thoma Bravo and Mayer Brown is acting for Boeing on the deal, which the jet maker said would enable it to focus on core business. It forms part of an effort by Kelly Ortberg, who took over as Boeing’s chief executive last August, to streamline the company, which is heavily indebted and has struggled to recover from safety scandals. 

The Kirkland team guiding Thoma Bravo is led by corporate partners Cole Parker, Peter Stach, Corey Fox, Brad Reed and Steven Page. In 2022 Parker and Stach advised the specialist technology investor, which has $179bn in assets, on its $8bn acquisition of business spend management specialist Coupa Software. Last year Fox and Reed also helped lead a Kirkland team that advised the company on its £4.3bn acquisition of cyber security company Darktrace. 

The Boeing deal represents a sizeable bet in a new industry for Thoma Bravo and suggests a belief that the assets possess predicatable revenues similar to software licences, according to a Financial Times report. 

The corporate and securities Mayer Brown team acting for Boeing is led by partner Jason Quintana and includes partner Magnus Karlberg in the firm’s Chicago and Northern California offices. Quintana was previously a M&A senior counsel at Boeing and has advised the company on numerous matters since leaving it for Perkins Coie in 2017 and then moving to Mayer Brown in 2021, including its acquisition of lease management software maker AerData. 

Boeing will sell AerData to Thoma Bravo as part of its latest deal, alongside other tech assets including Jeppesen, which provides navigation software, and ForeFlight, an aviation navigation app. 

However the company said it would retain its core digital capabilities that supply the aircraft and fleet-specific data it uses to provide fleet maintenance, diagnostics and repair services to its customers. Its digital aviation unit employs around 3,900 people globally, including people that will stay with Boeing after the sale. 

For its part Thoma Bravo will finance the deal with $6bn in equity and around $4bn in a private loan led by Apollo Global Management, the Financial Times reported, its largest loan as part of a $25bn lending partnership formed last year with Citigroup. 

Citi is acting as exclusive financial advisor to Boeing on the deal, which is expected to close by the end of 2025. 

News of the deal follows the strongest first quarter for global M&A since 2022 according to data from the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), with the value of deals jumping 15% on year-prior levels to $885bn. 

Kirkland, which consistently ranks as a leading deals advisor and topped LSEG’s M&A league tables for 2024, ranked fourth for Q1 2025 after working on deals worth just over $103bn. Mayer Brown was not among the top 25 law firms included in the rankings.