Legal News

Workin? For the Weekend: The Lawyers on the Express Scripts/WellPoint Deal

By Ashby Jones

Our heart goes out to anyone who didn’t spend five hours in front of the television on Sunday afternoon watching the Masters — one of the more spectacularly enjoyable athletic events in recent memory. (Phil, how do you miss that putt on 15?!)

That established, our heart likely goes out to batches of M&A lawyers from Skadden, White & Case and Cravath, who were presumably pulling a Loverboy (pictured) and putting the final touches on the weekend’s big deal — Express Scripts’ $4.675 billion acquisition of WellPoint’s NextRx subsidiaries — and not watching El Pato bring home the green jacket. Click here for the WSJ story on the merger; here for the Express Scripts press release.

Representing Express Scripts: Skadden’s Howard Ellin, Lou Kling, Kenneth Wolff, Cliff Aronson and Stephanie Teicher. Leading the way for WellPoint: White & Case’s Dan Dufner. Repping financial advisers Credit Suisse, JP Morgan and Citgroup: Cravath partners Michael Goldman and William Whelan.

In other Skadden news, check out this NYT front-pager on Skadden’s take-the-year-off-for-big-bucks program. We’re not sure if banking associate Heather Eisenlord watched Tiger shank his tee shot on 18, but, regardless, we’re shedding no tears for her. Eisenlord will soon travel around the world for a year, all the while collecting a cool 80 grand from Skadden.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 13, 2009 (boomark / email).