Legal News

Workin? For the Weekend: The Lawyers on the Oracle/Sun Deal

By Ashby Jones

We spent far too many hours this weekend watching our injured, grieving and generally underperforming Angels drop three straight to the Twins (does the Yankee bandwagon have room for one more?).

In retrospect, we sort of wish we’d been slammed with work, like the lawyers on the Oracle/Sun Microsystems deal presumably were. For those just rolling out of bed, Sun, which had for weeks been flirting with IBM, inked a $7.4 billion deal with Larry Ellison’s Oracle. Click here for the WSJ story.

In a conference call, Ellison described Sun’s Java as “the single most important software asset we have ever acquired.” As a result of the deal, he expects Oracle to be able to offer customers application programs, computers and data-storage hardware in a bundle that will be tuned to help solve their problems.

“There is no question in my mind that this transaction redefines the industry,” Scott McNealy, Sun’s chairman and co-founder, said during the conference call.

Lawyering up the deal: For Sun: Wilson Sonsini Palo Alto partners Larry Sonsini, Martin Korman, Todd Cleary and Scott Sher. Oracle’s team was led by Latham & Watkins’s John Newell.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 20, 2009 (boomark / email).