Last month I attended the inaugural “Dealmakers of the Year Awards” at Scott’s restaurant in London. The event, hosted by IntraLinks with the support of the Mergermarket Group, celebrated the achievements of M&A practitioners who have excelled in their field during the past 12 months in spite the financial crisis and its dramatic effect on global M&A deal volumes.

Short listing for the event was undertaken independently by mergermarket using the mergermarket.com M&A deals database which tracks transactions where the value is greater than €5m. Financial advisors and lawyers qualified on the basis of advice given on transactions to UK-based corporations, targets, vendors and acquirers. Selection was based on both the total volume and value of deals advised on.

Like many of those involved in the M&A market, I started the new decade thinking that things could only get better after recent economic challenges, and it appears that there are grounds for optimism.

At the end of last month I flew to Düsseldorf to attend the first of this year’s IntraLinks sponsored mergermarket M&A, Private Equity and Restructuring forums. Attended by over 200 delegates from across Germany, the event provided a fine array of speakers from some of the leading firms specializing in M&A and Private Equity.

With global M&A deal activity slipping down to 22% from 2008 levels (according to Dealogic) and some suggesting that we may have seen the bottom of the M&A market in 2009, I think it's safe to say that we’ll all be glad to say goodbye to 2009. And what better way to say farewell and to round the year off than with our Q4 Deal Flow Indicator results.

If you have been following our recent blogs on the M&A market, then the recent flurry of deal activity in global M&A will be of little surprise. The writing was on the (virtual) wall: quarterly Deal Flow Indicator results for Q2 and Q3 (read the results here) showed the beginning of an improvement in M&A deal volumes as early as July. Indeed, these optimistic indicators were echoed by the panelists in our recent UK Corporate Development webinar (watch the replay here).