Legal News

Who Lawyered Comcast-NBC? (And Whither Jack Donaghy?)

By Ashby Jones

UPDATE: Michael Corkery over at the Deal Journal on Thursday did his own nice post on the multitudes of lawyers that worked on the Comcast/GE/Vivendi deal. Of particular interest to us were some nice quotes from Davis Polk’s David Caplan, who served as lead lawyer for Comcast.

Caplan told Deal Journal in an interview that the Vivendi portion was relatively straight forward from a legal perspective: It involved a minority investor in NBC Universal (Vivendi) selling to a majority investor (GE). Comcast's bid, on the other hand, involved creating a "hugely complicated joint venture" that required a large legal team to conduct extensive due diligence, structure and negotiate the transaction and get the deal done, Caplan said.

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It was the worst kept secret in the history of dealmaking, but on Thursday it became official: Comcast agreed to take majority ownership of NBC Universal from General Electric in a deal that values NBC at $30 billion. Click here for the WSJ story; here for the NYT story.

Paving the way for the deal, GE reached a deal with NBC Universal’s minority owner, Vivendi, to buy its 20% stake in the entertainment company for $5.8 billion. Click here for the WSJ story on that spoke in the wheel.

Aside from wondering what’s going to happen to Jack Donaghy, Alec Baldwin’s character in “30 Rock,” our other concern involved, but of course, the lawyers. We can’t answer the Donaghy question — Will Comcast force NBC to delete all reference to GE on the show? — we can get you up to speed on the companies’ lawyers.

Leading the way for Comcast: Davis Polk, mostly out of its New York office. The partners include David Caplan, William Aaronson and Marc Williams (corporate); Avishai Shachar and Neil Barr (tax); Frank Azzopardi (IP); Kyoko Takahashi Lin (benefits); Thomas Patrick Dore Jr. (real estate); Joseph Hadley and Jason Kyrwood (credit); Gail Flesher (environmental); and Arthur Burke and Ronan Harty (antitrust).

Repping G.E. and NBC Universal: Weil Gotshal, mostly out of its New York office. The partners include: Howard Chatzinoff and R. Jay Tabor (M&A); Charan Sandhu (IP): Michael Kam (benefits); Angela Fontana and Andrew Yoon (finance); Kenneth Heitner (tax).

Repping Vivendi: Gibson Dunn, mostly out of its Los Angeles and New York office. The partners include: Ruth Fisher (corporate); Dennis Friedman (M&A); Hatef Behnia (tax); Sean Feller (benefits).

But wait, there’s more! Or at least there promises to be. According to the WSJ, the deal is expected to come under heavy scrutiny from consumer groups and lawmakers in a regulatory-approval process that could take more than a year.

Photo: NBC

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 03, 2009 (boomark / email).