Over four intense days last June, the New York office of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton was home to a tech industry battle royal—the auction of bankrupt client Nortel Networks Corporation’s trove of more than 6,000 patents and patent applications related to smartphone technologies. At the contentious bidders’ table, Google Inc., Apple Inc., Rockstar Bidco—a consortium of five companies that included Microsoft Corporation and Sony Corporation—and two other tech titians faced off against each other. Along with the Silicon Valley rivals, Cleary’s forty-sixth floor was crowded with more than 100 people: Nortel debtors from around the world, members of the official creditors committee, not to mention everyone’s lawyers.
“The sale was unprecedented,” says Cleary bankruptcy partner Lisa Schweitzer. “In or out of bankruptcy, a stand-alone patent portfolio of that size had never been sold—we were starting from whole cloth.”
