Corporate & Securities Law

The "Deal Cube" Chronicles: Part 3

By broc

The "Deal Cube" Chronicles: Part 3

Following up on Part 2, Charles Vaughn of Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough provides us some fodder for the latest installment of the "Deal Cube Chronicles":

"In my office at home is a beautiful deal cube for a follow on offering led by a bulge bracket firm in 2001. The cube refers to an offering of "Commom" Stock. When I pointed this out to the analyst at the firm who approved the toy, his face lost all color, and soon we had panicked emails from the higher ups requesting all of the toys. I have kept mine as an example to my sons, now 15 and 20, of how important it is to proofread carefully."

Those jonesing for their deal toys might want to know they can pick up some Lehman swag – cheap - as noted in this article from The Deal. There's a certain cachet about owning branded merchandise for a company that no longer exists. Too bad I didn't score a Pets.com sock puppet when I had the chance.

And as a follow-up to John Jenkins recent musings on closings generally, Chris Parrott, VP and Senior Counsel, Unum Group gives us his nostalgic memories:

"I am an in-house counsel who worked on my first transaction of any size in 1987. I lived out of state more or less for two months, working late into every night with outside counsel, ordering dinner from the Pacific Dining Car like it was McDonald's, watching similarly hard-working litigators recreating automobile accidents with toy cars. The last night of work, before heading to closing in another city put me in the sellers' offices, putting documents to bed, until about 4 am when I hurried to catch a plane. At the closing itself, there was all of the tedium and boredom, with the occasional excitement of counting pages in copies, related in this space by others on this subject.

Eventually, funds were received and we made a mad dash to the airport in limos (which added to a sense of living, at least for a while, among the masters of the universe) only to find we had missed our flight, in spite of every flight having been rain delayed. When I finally arrived late that evening at a connecting airport, there were no more connections to be made. I ultimately arrived at the office by the middle of the next morning.

The point of this recitation is not to bemoan the loss of the glamour of preparation, closing and celebration of a deal as it was done in the last century, but to say that hindsight suggests that the perception of such glamour may have been self-delusion. Today's process of emails and telephone calls along with one or two all-hands meetings is certainly more efficient but it leaves little room for war stories that prove to younger generations how tough the practice of law was in the 'old days.'"

Full post as published by DealLawyers.com Blog on May 04, 2009 (boomark / email).