Portfolio Media. Inc. | 111 West 19th Street, 5th Floor | New York, NY 10011 | www.law360.com
Phone: +1 646 783 7100 | Fax: +1 646 783 7161 | customerservice@law360.com

Technology Group Of The Year: Skadden
By Madison Arnold
Law360 (March 3, 2023, 2:02 PM EST) -- Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLP handled some of theyear's most headline-making deals, including the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk and the$75 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft Corp., earning the firm's technology group aspot among Law360's 2022 Technology Groups of the Year.
Attorneys in Skadden's technology group credits the firm's
collaborative culture for being able to handle such big deals.
"We're a one-firm culture. So when we talk about our technology
team, it's all of us here in the Bay Area who worked on the tech deals,
but even more so than that, we have a great teamwork across offices,and we're able to successfully integrate teams from other offices,
including D.C., which has a lot of folks in our antitrust and national
security practices," said partner Sonia Nijjar. "Of course, technology isa global industry, and we're able to work seamlessly with ourspecialists across all offices to deliver that global capability for ourclients."
That teamwork was essential in representing gaming company Activision Blizzard's $75 billion
acquisition by Microsoft, announced in January 2022. The deal required the technology group to workwith the firm's regulatory attorneys in other offices, as well as antitrust, data privacy, intellectualproperty, labor, and employment and tax practices.
"From a client-facing perspective, the client's seeing just one unified team and a consistency of advice,[and it] is really a strength of the practice and the firm," said partner Kenton King. "It's really helpful tosee what's incrementally different about the situation, and the entire team understand what's different
about this particular situation and come up with creative solutions on how to address it. That I think is areal strength."
The complex deal had a whole host of challenges, including navigating "intense" negotiations, the firm
said.
The move united the maker of Xbox video game consoles with the developer of games like Candy Crush,
Call of Duty and Warcraft, and it added up to the largest video gaming industry acquisition deal in
history, by far, according to data from Dealogic.

"Given the sheer size of the deal, we knew that there was going to be significant public and regulatory
scrutiny on the deal," Nijjar said. "Everything we did on the deal was subject to a layer of regulatory
scrutiny. We knew that there was going to be a ton of eyes on the deal, both from a regulatory
perspective, and then also from a general public perspective, given that size. We had to think about
legal concepts and analyzing the deal through this antitrust lens and sort of the general public scrutinylens."
The team entered the year thinking that Activision Blizzard would be the matter most scrutinized by thepublic until the Elon Musk Twitter deal came along, Nijjar said. The firm managed the merger andacquisition efforts on this massive deal.
In April 2022, Tesla CEO and entrepreneur Musk announced he would buy the social media giant for$54.20. The price represented a premium of 38% on Twitter's stock price on April 1, the day before
Musk disclosed that he had acquired a 9% stake in the company.
Skadden's Mike Ringler said that what made representing Musk in the deal challenging was thecomplexity of the financing structure. It involved bank, bond and equity financing as well as margin loans
and personal equity from Tesla, he said.
"Even in a normal market environment with a normal company, it would have been a complex
undertaking," Ringler said. "I think what made it unique was the fact that on top of the challenges ofcompleting a deal of that size and scale, you had all the publicity.
"Elon ... liked to communicate directly with the public, expressing his points of view rather freely, someof which can be controversial, some of which are not, but he's just a very transparent guy. And you had
to take some of those public observations and their publicity they generated and layer it on top of thetransaction, and it had implications for the transaction and, in particular, the financing as well asobviously, the underlying acquisition itself."
For the Skadden technology team, King said that he word to describe their year would be "challenging,"
but that that keeps the attorneys on the team motivated to tackle more in the future.
"I thought I'd seen everything there was to see. You do this long enough, and you see more things thatyou've never seen before and more challenges to overcome, so that's what keeps it interesting. And to
be able to deliver on the goal for clients is one of the things that keeps us all motivated and this is a year
where there were plenty of obstacles to overcome," King said.
–Additional reporting by Tom Zanki and Benjamin Horney. Editing by Peter Rozovsky.

All Content © 2003-2023, Portfolio Media, Inc.