Morrison & Foerster Named Technology & Telecom Law Firm of the Year

Morrison & Foerster was honored to receive the Technology & Telecom Law Firm of the Year award at the inaugural 2018 Deal Awards, presented by The Deal.

The award builds on Morrison & Foerster’s already outstanding reputation in the technology, media and telecom (TMT) space, which the firm has earned through decades of representing many of the largest and highest-profile companies in the TMT space. In addition to being named as the Technology & Telecom Law Firm of the Year by The Deal, the firm has also earned recognition as Information Technology Law Firm of the Year by U.S. News – Best Lawyers® “Best Law Firms” for seven of the past eight years, speaking to the consistent quality of the firm’s TMT offerings.

MoFo’s M&A group, like the firm, is widely recognized as the go-to practice in the TMT field, regularly advising on complex, high-profile and often industry-setting TMT transactions. The practice’s recent work has included:

• Representing Sprint Corp. and SoftBank Group Corp., the controlling shareholder of Sprint, on the proposed all-stock merger of Sprint and T-Mobile US Inc. The total implied enterprise value for Sprint in the transaction is approximately $59 billion and the aggregate for the combined company enterprise value is approximately $146 billion.
• Advising Toshiba in the $18 billion sale of its wholly owned subsidiary Toshiba Memory Corporation to a consortium led by Bain Capital, the largest Japanese inbound M&A deal since 2011, as well as both the largest private equity and leveraged finance deal ever in Asia.
• Representing SoftBank Group Corp. in a number of significant investments, including in its $7.7 billion primary and secondary investment as part of a $9.3 billion sale of stock by Uber, the largest-ever private secondary transaction in the technology space. 
• Representing Mobileye N.V., an Israeli company that develops technology for driver assistance systems and autonomous driving, in its $15.3 billion acquisition by Intel Corporation, a leading international technology and semiconductor company.
• Advising VMware in its strategic negotiations with Dell relating to Dell’s plans to go public through a complicated tracking stock transaction valued at $21.7 billion. Funding for the transaction is tied to VMware’s announcement to issue a $11 billion pro rata special dividend to all holders of VMware common stock.

While the firm’s M&A activity in the TMT space has played a large part in the recent success of our global M&A practice, which in 2017 advised on 161 deals including 17 deals with values north of $1 billion, our work has also included equally complex and high-profile deals in a range of key industries, including real estate, life sciences, energy, consumer products and financial institutions.

The Deal is a global media organization that provides news coverage and analysis on the M&A, private equity, and deal economy.

Hundreds of peer nominations were submitted for the 2018 Deal Awards. Analysts and experts were then interviewed to develop a shortlist, from which The Deal’s editorial staff selected the winners. The Deal Awards recognize the lawyers, bankers, and service providers that are deemed “integral” to M&A and private equity transactions.

Winners were recognized during an awards ceremony on June 21 in New York City.