Lehman Brothers Inc. suffered a slight when Ikon Office Solutions Inc., a longtime client of the beleaguered firm, hired Goldman, Sachs & Co. for advice on its $1.6 billion sale to Ricoh Co. Ltd., announced Aug. 27. Ikon tapped Lehman for its last large deal, the $1.5 billion sale of its leasing business to General Electric Co. in 2003, and on a $295 million self-tender in December 2007. But this time around, the Malvern, Pa.-based document manager turned to Goldman's Dusty Philip, Jeff Dodge and Josh O'Mara for its sale to Tokyo-based Ricoh. Goldman would not comment on how it won the business.

Ricoh, meanwhile, used Morgan Stanley managing directors Tsunehiro Watabe, Haruo Nakamura, Kenji Fujita, Ryusuke Shigetomi, Tedd Smith and executive directors Hironobu Wakabayashi and Michael McLaughlin.

Both companies turned to familiar outside counsel. Ricoh used Ken Siegel and associate Ivan Smallwood of Morrison & Foerster LLP's Tokyo office. The firm has handled several deals for Ricoh, Siegel says, including its 2004 acquisition of Hitachi Ltd.'s global printing business. Ikon tapped Richard Hall of Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, which has worked for the company since 1998, the year James Forese joined as Ikon CEO from longtime Cravath client IBM Corp. Forese tapped Cravath's Rory Millson and Thomas Rafferty to handle a piece of securities litigation. Cravath retained the client even after Forese stepped down as CEO in 2002.