Media
News
Media Mentions
Jared Kaplan reviewed for Yahoo! Finance (August 23) the most important concepts that employees at companies that have an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) should understand. These include: 1) Individual account value. "In a public company the value will fluctuate with the market value of the company," Mr. Kaplan said. "In a private company the value will be determined by an appraisal, which is performed at least once a year." 2) Retirement benefits. He noted that an employee will want to know "how and when the benefits under the plan will be paid to you or to your beneficiary." 3) Tax issues. Mr. Kaplan stated that, "If certain requirements are met, a substantial portion of your distribution from an ESOP may be taxed at long-term capital gains rates," which are substantially lower than most ordinary income tax rates.
Jared Kaplan , Employee Benefits & Pensions
Joseph Winterscheid summarized for both Private Equity Wire and Hedge Week (August 23) what the FTC’s new horizontal merger guidelines will mean from a regulatory standpoint. “The new guidelines’ shift in focus seem to be a response to the agencies’ difficulty in sustaining their burden of proof concerning market definition in past unsuccessful merger challenges,” he said. “By placing greater emphasis on evidence of a transaction’s competitive effects, the agencies allow themselves more flexibility to avoid complicated market definition issues and instead to address the central question posed by a transaction, namely whether it will result in anti-competitive effects.” Because of this, he added, “Parties will need to exercise greater care in how they discuss and document competition and pricing decisions in internal documents.”
Joseph F. Winterscheid , Antitrust & Competition
Julie Kwon was mentioned by Law.com on August 23, which noted that she had rejoined the firm as a private client group partner in the Silicon Valley office and will advise clients on estate planning, transfer tax, charitable planning and exempt organization compliance issues. Ms. Kwon had previously been a partner in McDermott’s Chicago office, but most recently was philanthropic adviser at Stanford University.
Julie K. Kwon , Private Client
Joseph Winterscheid was interviewed on August 23 by the National Law Journal regarding the Federal Trade Commission's new guidelines on horizontal mergers between competitors. He said that the guidelines will make such mergers "a more fluid process…. Companies and their counsel will need to be a little more adept at being prepared for more in-depth reviews at the early stages than we've seen in prior years." Mr. Winterscheid expects such government reviews to be more fact-intensive, so the merger parties will "want to have a better understanding of [the] full range of competitive issues that might be raised, as opposed to companies' relative position in the marketplace." But he did not see an increase in rejections of proposed mergers, saying that "the new guidelines reflect … how the agencies have been approaching merger analysis for the last couple of years."
Joseph F. Winterscheid , Antitrust & Competition
Terence Healey and Dennis White were quoted in an August 20 Investment Dealers Digest story about how private equity firms and other investors are pursuing incentives to invest in clean technology companies. “In many respects the U.S. is behind” other countries in promoting clean technology, Mr. Healey said, “but there is a great need to become green, and many folks see this as a boon industry.” “Some great new technologies are already being used,” Mr. White agreed. For example, he noted, “Larger companies are looking into things like having hybrid trucking fleets, painting their roofs white to absorb less energy, and installing motion detectors so display cases don’t light up until someone is looking at them.”
Terence Healey , Dennis J. White , Corporate , Energy & Commodities Advisory
