Cooley Takes Break From Tech Deals to Advise on Sports Illustrated Sale
A team from Paul Weiss represented Authentic Brands Group in its purchase of Sports Illustrated from media conglomerate Meredith Corp.
May 29, 2019 at 03:27 PM
3 minute read
Sports Illustrated covers. Photo: Jason Doiy/ALM
Cooley may have developed a reputation for advising tech and life sciences darlings that didn't exist even a decade ago, but a different kind of firm client was the one making news on the deal front this week: Meredith Corp., an old-media conglomerate that launched 117 years ago with a magazine about farming.
In its latest deal for Meredith, Cooley advised the company on the sale of Sports Illustrated (aged 65) to Authentic Brands Group, which owns or manages brands ranging from Juicy Couture and Aeropostale to Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. Authentic Brands was represented in the $110 million deal by Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
Cooley, which recently collected over $3 million in fees advising on the IPOs for startups Uber, Zoom and PagerDuty, deployed a team for Meredith led by partners Aaron Binstock and Kevin Mills.
The Sports Illustrated sale is just the latest in a string of deals Cooley has handled for Meredith in the past two years. Those include the company's purchase of Time Inc. in a transaction valued at $2.8 billion (SI was one of the properties it acquired in the Time deal), as well as Meredith's $150 million sale of another magazine property, Fortune Magazine, last year.
In the latest deal, Authentic Brands Group is represented by a Paul Weiss team that includes Neil Goldman, Charles Googe and Robert Schumer. Paul Weiss also brokered a deal recently between ABG and Canadian pharma and cannabis company Tilray Inc, to develop, market and distribute cannabis products wherever they are legal.
The Sports Illustrated sale has some interesting elements attached to it. Although ABG will take possession of SI's intellectual property and brands (Swimsuit, SI Kids, Sportsman of the Year, SI and SI.tv), Meredith will continue to manage publication of the magazine and SI.com for a period of no less than two years. It will pay ABG for the rights to do so.
The controversial user-generated content site FanSided, a digital platform bought by Time Inc in 2015 and used to help bolster SI local content online, will not be included in the package and will be sold separately by Meredith.
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