UPDATE: 8/21/13, 6:50 p.m. EDT. The names of the lawyers from Goodwin Procter advising Trusteer have been added to the ninth paragraph of this story.

On the day the Central Intelligence Agency officially acknowledged, albeit indirectly, Area 51's existence, and an Edward Snowden–leaked internal audit showed the National Security Agency flouting privacy protocols thousands of times over the past two years, The Am Law Daily deemed it an appropriate time to look at the lawyers working on a large deal unveiled this week in the cybersecurity sector.

International Business Machines, the world’s largest technology services company, announced Thursday that it has agreed to acquire Israeli fraud protection and security software provider Trusteer for an undisclosed sum that various media outlets pegged at roughly $1 billion.
The deal, which will result in IBM launching a new cybersecurity research lab in Israel, comes amid an ongoing data privacy debate in the United States and abroad as companies and governments take steps to guard against cyberattacks. Just this week, IBM secured a $1 billion cloud-computing contract with the U.S. Department of the Interior, after losing out to Amazon in the bidding for on a $600 million CIA pact.
Cravath, Swaine & Moore corporate partner George Schoen is leading a team from the firm advising Armonk, New York–based IBM on the acquisition. Other lawyers working on the deal include Cravath employee benefits partner Jennifer Conway, tax partners Andrew Needham and J. Leonard Teti II, and associates William Abbott, Christopher Fargo, Nicole Foster, Michelle Garrett, Jarrett Hoffman, Jane Manning, and Allison Wein. None of the firm's lawyers were available to discuss particulars of the transaction.
Partners Barry Levenfeld and Benjamin Sandler and associates David Roness and Noam Enk from Yigal Arnon & Co. in Jerusalem are are serving as local counsel to IBM on the deal, the company’s largest-ever in Israel, according to Israeli business publication Globes. Levenfeld previously advised IBM on its roughly $350 million acquisition of Israeli data storage technology company XIV in 2008.
Robert Weber, general counsel and head of legal and regulatory affairs at IBM and a frequent commentator on in-house and legal industry issues, did not respond to a request for comment about the Trusteer acquisition, which is expected to close in the third quarter of this year.
Former IBM in-house attorney David Kappos joined Cravath in February after stepping down from his position as director of the Patent and Trademark Office. Recent deals on which the firm has advised longtime client IBM include its $2 billion acquisition of cloud-computing company SoftLayer Technologies in June and $1.3 billion purchase of human resources software provider Kenexa last year.
Trusteer, which was founded in 2006 and has offices in Boston and Tel Aviv, is backed by data security investor and entrepreneur Shlomo Kramer and Silicon Valley–based U.S. Venture Partners. ( John Hadl, a partner with the venture capital firm, began his career at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett.)
Goodwin Procter corporate partner Kenneth Gordon, labor and employment partner Robert Hale, executive compensation partner Scott Webster, tax partner Mark Kirshenbaum, and national security and foreign trade regulation head Richard Matheny III are advising Trusteer on the transaction, along with associates Sarah Bock, Evan Kearns, and Diana Myers.
Goldfarb Seligman & Co.—Israel's largest firm and the product of a 2011 merger between two top local shops—is serving as Israeli counsel to Trusteer through international corporate and securities head Ashok Chandrasekhar and corporate partners Noa Rosenberg-Segalovitz and Sharon Aloni.
In June, Chandrasekhar led a team from the firm serving as local counsel to Google on its $1.1 billion purchase of Israeli mapping software company Waze, according to our previous reports. Like IBM's acquisition of Trusteer, Google's Waze buy was another sign that Israel has become a hub for cross-border M&A work in the technology sector—good news for local lawyers toiling in the country's newly deregulated legal market, as well as the foreign firms that are getting a more welcome reception these days.
Last month Morrison & Foerster advised Maryland-based cybersecurity services provider Sourcefire on its $2.7 billion sale to Cisco. The purchase price represented a steep markup from the $225 million that Israeli network security firm Check Point Software Technologies was to pay for Sourcefire in 2005 before abandoning the deal in the face of U.S. government security concerns.
Fenwick & West, which is advising Cisco on its bid to buy Sourcefire, according to sibling publication The Recorder, counseled the networking giant earlier this on its $475 million purchase of Israeli cellphone network equipment maker Intucell. O’Melveny & Myers and Tel Aviv–based Herzog Fox & Neeman advised Intucell on that transaction.
Herzog Fox was in the news earlier this year thanks to the ongoing interest in former employee Ben Zygier, an Australian and Israeli citizen found dead in December 2010 after reportedly hanging himself in his cell in a maximum-security prison near Tel Aviv.
Zygier trained as a lawyer at Aussie firm Deacons and Herzog Fox before going on to join Israel’s intelligence agency the Mossad, where he mistakenly leaked secrets that led to the arrest of two key Hezbollah informants in Lebanon, according to an in-depth report by Der Spiegel.
One of Zygier's lawyers, Israeli human rights attorney Avigdor Feldman, told the Israeli press that his client did not want to accept a plea deal. Zygier's family has reportedly been compensated for his death.