Latham takes lead on Oracle's $7.4bn Sun buyout

The definitive agreement was reached two weeks ago after talks between IBM and Sun ended in a disagreement over price and Oracle stepped in to pay $9.50 (£6.50) a share, a slight increase on the $9.40 (£6.45) offered by IBM.

The Latham team acting for Oracle was led by San Francisco corporate chair John Newell, alongside partners Daniel Wall, Karen Silverman, Joseph Yaffe and Laurence Stein. Oracle was also advised by Silicon Valley boutique GTC Law Group.

The deal is Newell's second for Oracle. In January 2008, he represented the software company its $8.5bn (£5.8bn) acquisition of rival BEA Systems.

Oracle had previously worked with Davis Polk & Wardwell M&A partner William Kelly on a handful of its bigger and more complex deals, including its $10bn (£6.8bn) bid for PeopleSoft and its 2006 purchase of Siebel Systems for $5.85bn (£4bn).

Oracle's links with Latham date back to 2004, when San Francisco antitrust partner Daniel Wall, who assisted Newell on the current deal, helped Oracle beat back a significant antitrust challenge by the US Department of Justice following the PeopleSoft takeover battle.

The California-based Oracle has been on a deal streak this past year with a strategy to buy and sell a broad palette of products. Last month it agreed to buy Relsys, a software developer for the health sciences industry, while in January, it announced it would buy mValent, a developer of application management software. Last year, it acquired eleven companies, including BEA.

Sun was advised by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. The team was led by partners Martin Korman and Larry Sonsini and included partners Todd Cleary and Scott Sher. The US firm previously acted for Sun on its $4.1bn (£2.bn) acquisition of Storage Technology in 2005.

A merger between IBM and Sun would have given the combined company a 50% market share in the network storage systems market, but the tie-up was complicated by antitrust and intellectual property concerns.

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