Sirius XM Radio Inc. stayed with Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP as counsel on the deal it announced Feb. 17 with Liberty Media Corp. Sirius general counsel Patrick Donnelly started his career as an associate at Simpson before going in-house at ITT Corp.
He moved to Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. in 1998 as general counsel and
held the spot after Sirius' merger with XM Satellite Radio Holdings
Inc. closed last year. Donnelly has used Simpson's Gary L. Sellers as outside corporate counsel for a decade, and Sellers is handling the Liberty Media deal with Simpson's Pete Martelli. Sirius used bankers Jimmy Lee, Anwar Zakkour and Jim Casey at J.P. Morgan Securities Inc., which represented XM in the Sirius tie-up, as well as Roger C. Altman, David Ying, Qazi Fazal, Cecil Brown, Liana Blat and Matthew Brooks at Evercore Partners Inc.
Liberty turned to Marc Leaf and Martin Toulouse at longtime counsel Baker Botts LLP.
Continue reading below
In the late '70s,
John Malone, who controls Liberty Media, and
Robert Magness, the late founder of Tele-Communications Inc., began using
Jerome Kern,
who was at the now-defunct Greenbaum, Wolf & Ernst. The lawyer took
the relationship with Malone to various firms, including Shea &
Gould. In 1991, Kern and several partners became the core of the New
York office of Houston-based Baker Botts and continued to work with
Malone. Kern ultimately left Baker Botts and for almost a decade held
various executive and board positions with Malone-led companies, but
the relationship stayed with the law firm, where a number of partners
have tended to it. In December, Kern
replaced Christie Hefner as the CEO of
Playboy Enterprises Inc., where he had been a director since 2002.
On the banking side, Liberty is using Aryeh Bourkoff, Omar Jaffrey, Ehren Stenzler, Jeff Gelles, Yuri Brodsky and Gregg Newman of UBS Investment Bank. EchoStar Corp., which had purchased some of Sirius' debt, used Scott Miller at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. His partner, Frank Aquila, represented EchoStar in 2001 on its failed merger attempt with Hughes Electronics Corp.
