CORPORATE SECURITIES

JOSHUA SAMEK

DLA Piper

The co-chair of DLA Piper's corporate practice helped engineer major financing deals for three health care companies in serial fashion.

In November 2018, Joshua Samek's team advised Mednax Inc. as it issued $500 million in senior unsecured notes to guarantee long-term fixed-rate capital to pay down a revolving credit facility and improve its capitalization structure. A follow-up package for the same amount was issued in February, and a $1.2 billion credit line was amended in March to extend it to 2024.

In January, Opko Health Inc, issued $200 million in convertible notes to fund research and development to help commercialize proprietary pharmaceutical and diagnostic products.

And in April, the legal team worked on $300 million in term loan financing for TherapeuticsMD Inc. to commercialize three products with recent Food and Drug Administration approval.

Describe a key element of the transaction and how it influenced the outcome: As a corporate lawyer who represents public companies and private equity sponsors in regulated industries — particularly health care, life sciences and financial technology — timing is always a key element in transactions. Financing transactions in particular often follow key third-party catalysts for companies, such as regulatory approvals, partnership agreements or licensing deals. While in some cases the timing for these catalysts is known in advance, in others they are not, and even in situations where timing can be anticipated, there are often curveballs in the process.

Our transaction team needed to be ready on short notice to help a recent client in the pharmaceutical industry respond to this type of critical milestone and rapidly adapted to changing circumstances and transaction structures in what was a highly volatile market. To be able to do this, we worked closely with our client and formed a unified team with the client's in-house counsel and in-house finance group.

Working closely with these in-house teams was — and remains — one of the most rewarding aspects of my practice. I consider it a privilege to have helped my clients obtain the financing necessary to bring new drugs to market, provide extraordinary health care to patients and change the financial marketplace.