Houlihan Lokey Deal Size

Analyst at HL here so I can provide some insight. The answer is both yes and no.

As with many other MM banks, the deal size will naturally increase due to sponsor relationships. Often what happens is an investment bank was the sell-side advisor for a company when it was sold to a PE firm, and often gets the role of acting as sell-side advisor again when the PE firm exits the portco years down the line. Naturally, the portco that the MM is advising has usually grown, and thus deal sizes grow as well.

League tables don't show the values of deals that don't disclose transaction values, so most MM firms are undercounted in league tables. That being said, HL's deal size may not grow that much as you'd like to think. Over the past few years, HL management started to care much more about revenue/MD in judging firm performance. As a result, under pressure to boost their stats, MDs have increasingly taken on transactions for the minimum fee value ($1.5M) which obviously tend to be smaller transactions, so as an analyst I've been increasingly staffed on transactions on the LMM side. I remember during early 2021, I was staffed on five different sell-sides with a cumulative value of around $250M or so. Great deal reps, but not so sexy to put on the resume. Anecdotally, over my time at HL, the vast majority of most of my transactions have been under $500M, with an average size of maybe $300-$350M, but I've also worked on a transaction over $1B.