Dealmaking has slowed—except among dealmakers

IN THE MARKET for corporate counsel, building is more common than buying. Shelling out for a bullpen of bankers or lawyers is often more costly than poaching a rival’s star performers. So if mergers are, like second marriages, a triumph of hope over experience, then the advisers who put them together really should know better when it comes to their own family. Though their clients are announcing tie-ups at the slowest pace in a decade, in recent weeks the corporate consiglieri have struck a flurry of deals among themselves. Three big transactions illustrate how they may be fooling themselves.