Mark Gorman estimates he’s worked on as many as 100 deals in his 13 years at Cisco Systems Inc., where he is vice president of mergers and acquisitions and deputy general counsel. As he puts it, every one is different, and nothing is routine. That was true with last year’s $635 million purchase of cybersecurity firm OpenDNS, an acquisition that got antitrust review in the U.S. and the Ukraine and required him to look beyond his go-to outside counsel.

What was your role throughout the deal? I started working with the corporate development team fairly early on. We had an investment in the company and one of my colleagues led. It was one of the things that, we often make investments and, then we decide, “You know what? This actually would be good inside of Cisco.” We started to look at following an acquisition path. I worked with the corporate development team for a few months, and we pulled together a term sheet and no-shop agreement and then we negotiated through that process. Then I had to have surgery so one of my colleagues took over to run the deal. Connie Chen, who has been part of M&A legal at Cisco now for more than a decade, ran with it while I was out of commission. Then she and I both worked together to lead through the diligence, the merger agreement and other definitive agreement negotiations, to signing. At that point, our antitrust colleague Gil Ohana jumped in to help with the [Hart-Scott-Rodino] filing. One of our colleagues in Europe, Magdalena Jakubicz, jumped in to do the Ukrainian filing and ultimately we moved on to closing. It was a real team effort.

This content has been archived. It is available through our partners, LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law.

To view this content, please continue to their sites.

Not a Lexis Subscriber?
Subscribe Now

Not a Bloomberg Law Subscriber?
Subscribe Now

Why am I seeing this?

LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law are third party online distributors of the broad collection of current and archived versions of ALM's legal news publications. LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law customers are able to access and use ALM's content, including content from the National Law Journal, The American Lawyer, Legaltech News, The New York Law Journal, and Corporate Counsel, as well as other sources of legal information.

For questions call 1-877-256-2472 or contact us at [email protected]