Foley & Lardner's Mary Braza
Brewers and Yankees fans lawyered Chicago Cubs sale
October 28, 2009
The Chicago Cubs sale was completed this week with assistance from a slew of lawyers with a variety of baseball loyalties.
Foley & Lardner represented the Ricketts family, who bought the Cubs baseball team for $845 million. Proskauer Rose was counsel to three big banks that provided a $450 million loan for the deal. And McDermott, Will & Emery represented the former team owner, the Tribune Co., in the sale.
Foley landed the work with the Ricketts family partly because it has represented Major League Baseball since the mid 1980s and understands the rules governing a team sale and prior league approval, said partner Mary K. Braza, who leads the firm's sports industry team from Milwaukee. The work also came through Foley partner Phillip Goldberg in Chicago, who has a longtime connection to Tom Ricketts, the founder of Omaha, Neb.-based TD Ameritrade Inc.
Braza, a Milwaukee Brewers season ticketholder who became more of a Cubs fan during the deal, said the biggest moment of concern came after the Tribune filed for bankruptcy protection last December during the bidding process for the Cubs.
Proskauer partner Jon Oram, who calls himself a "diehard Yankees fan," coordinated dozens of his firm's attorneys in four U.S. offices working on financing for the deal. The "trickiest" part was the separate and short Cubs bankruptcy case, with a filing on Oct. 12 and an exit on Oct. 27, he said.
The team bankruptcy was essentially built into the transaction to ensure the franchise would be protected in the future from past creditors, some of whom are still part of the Tribune's bankruptcy case. The financing for the deal was put in escrow during the Cubs bankruptcy process.
While the transaction was the biggest team sale that Oram had ever worked on, he noted it didn't top the $1.6 billion financing to fund the new Meadowlands Stadium being built for his hometown football teams, the New York Jets and Giants.
Brooks Gruemmer, a partner in McDermott's Chicago office, led his firm's work on the transaction for the Tribune. "It was a complex structure in a tough transactional environment," he said.
Lynne Marek can be contacted at lmarek@alm.com.
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