Few Degrees of Separation Among Antitrust Attys in Microsoft’s Yahoo Bid
A bevy of M&A lawyers will be at work on Microsoft’s proposed deal to buy Yahoo, but it’s the antitrust lawyers who will have a key role, Legal Times reports.
Charles “Rick” Rule—the antitrust chairman at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft—will be trying to persuade federal and European regulators as well as the public that the merger is good for consumers. He has already hit the ground running, trying to persuade Robert Lande of the American Antitrust Institute that the merger will increase competition with a search engine that can rival Google’s dominant engine. (The AAI was not persuaded; it issued a statement calling for close scrutiny of the proposal.)
Rule is one of several lawyers advising Microsoft and Google with longtime relationships. Many stem from a stint at the antitrust departments of Covington & Burling or Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Legal Times (sub. req.) reports in a separate article.
Rule once was a partner at Covington, giving him ties to Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith; Thomas Barnett, head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division; and David Meyer, who is the division’s deputy assistant attorney general for civil enforcement and who was Rule’s special assistant when Rule headed the antitrust division from 1987 to 1989.
On the other side, many of Google’s lawyers have links to Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, which has represented Google since it was incorporated in 1998 by Wilson’s chairman Larry Sonsini. One of the lawyers representing Google is the firm’s Washington antitrust chair, Susan Creighton, who was director of the Federal Trade Commission’s bureau of competition. Google’s general counsel, David Drummond, was a former partner at Wilson Sonsini.
