MORRISON FOERSTER

The team showed exceptional skill in handling complex, cross-border transactions. The deal they helped us with involved multiple international jurisdictions and time zones, and yet the team was able to provide seamless and uninterrupted advice with a strong focus on client service. They also showed great teamwork, professionalism and creativity.
— Chambers Global

We represent Fortune 500 companies, private equity firms, investment banks, and privately-held companies in their most high-profile and complex mergers and acquisitions.

Some relevant statistics:

• A truly global practice with more than 250 Corporate/M&A lawyers located in key technology and financial centers throughout the world

Advised on 853 M&A transactions over the past 5 years, with a total value of approximately US$575 billion, including 84 deals over US$1 billion

A “go-to” firm for cross-border deal-making, with over 50% of our transactions last year involving multiple jurisdictions

• Ranked by Chambers for Corporate/M&A in regions throughout Asia, Europe and the U.S.
• Only global firm ranked Band 1 in M&A for all leading publications in Japan
   

– Chambers Global & Asia Pacific, Legal 500 Asia Pacific, IFLR1000

Full Range of Experience

Our depth of transactional experience includes:

• Traditional M&A transactions for both private and public companies
• Cross-border transactions
• Serial acquisition programs
• Proxy contests, and hostile and contested transactions
• Special committee and Board counseling
• Poison pill and other defensive counseling
• Going private and other transactions with controlling shareholders or other insiders
• Private equity-sponsored transactions
• Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) transactions
• "Roll ups" and other consolidation programs
• Auctions, "go shops" and other bid programs
• Corporate carve-outs and divisional acquisitions
• Joint ventures and complex strategic alliances
• Advice to investment banks in their capacity as M&A advisors
• Recapitalizations, bankruptcy, and distressed and leveraged transactions

Global Focus

Our M&A experience reflects our focus on cross-border transactions. We are truly a global firm ‒ from our client base to the MoFo team members on each deal. Many of our lawyers are multilingual and have practiced in several global jurisdictions. Where needed, we can seamlessly staff M&A projects across Asia, Europe and the Americas.

This unparalleled global platform includes the most active practice of any international firm in Japan, with more than 50 attorneys principally engaged in cross-border M&A transactions. The preeminent team has acted as lead counsel on some of the most significant Japan-related transactions in history, both inbound and outbound, and is a go-to advisor for Japan’s leading technology and telecommunications companies, including SoftBank, Hitachi, Fujitsu, and Toshiba.

Integrated Team

Our M&A lawyers also work as an integrated team with advisors in key areas such as intellectual property, antitrust, capital markets, litigation, tax, labor and benefits, finance and bankruptcy, real estate, ESG/sustainability, environmental, and securities. Our internal approach is highly collaborative.

Morrison Foerster has one of the leading real estate practices in the United States, Asia, and Europe. We provide innovative and practical legal advice to a broad range of real estate industry participants in all types of real estate transactions, including acquisition, development, financing, ownership, leasing, and operation. In particular, we regularly assist our clients in debt and equity transactions covering virtually all real estate product types.

In an era in which the real estate industry has become increasingly global and oriented toward capital markets, we are able to provide our clients with the most effective legal representation, notwithstanding the location, size, staffing needs, or time constraints of any transaction. To ensure effective geographic coverage for our clients, real estate lawyers are resident in most of the firm’s major offices. Additionally, the lawyers in our Real Estate Group work in cooperation with our colleagues in the firm’s Financial Transactions, Tax, Securities, Corporate, Bankruptcy, Litigation, and other practice areas to bring the full resources of the firm to bear in addressing the needs of our clients.

In the recent words of clients, our Real Estate Group “really understands the client’s needs and the team is phenomenal - they are efficient, thorough and all of the attorneys are walking encyclopedias.” Clients praise our “holistic and results-oriented approach,” saying that we have “outstanding breadth of expertise in real estate transactions” and grasp “the larger issues as well as the fine details that make or break a transaction - the i’s are always dotted and the t’s are always crossed.” (Chambers USA)

Copyright enforcement and litigation issues have exploded in recent years, fueled by two parallel circumstances: technologies have evolved rapidly in their ability to share information, and intellectual property owners have become more sophisticated in their efforts to monetize those technologies’ value in their portfolios. We work alongside our clients to protect these valuable assets across a range of counseling activities: we prepare demand letters and pursue takedowns; we sue for damages and/or injunctive relief; and we take cases through trial or arbitration, oftentimes on landmark, precedential copyright issues.

From the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to the European Union Directive on Copyright, we maintain a truly global knowledge of copyright legislation and its impact on our clients’ businesses. We understand how each country’s laws and precedents can protect a copyright owner’s rights in an age where infringement can be increasingly difficult to detect and defeat, as well as understanding and supporting market players exploiting and distributing copyright-protected intellectual property in a progressively more regulated era.

We are deeply involved in the complex issues surrounding computer software, including issues relating to the scope of copyright protection and business arrangements for research and development, consulting, and licensing. We have counseled companies on developing products that are compatible with products of other vendors. When these issues proceed to trial, our stellar IP litigation team has the legal and technological savvy to understand these complexities and, equally as important, to explain them to lay judges and juries.