Dealmaker in the Spotlight: For the international $113 billion rescue package aimed at shoring up Ireland’s teetering government finances, the Irish government relied on Pádraig Ó Ríordáin, managing partner of Dublin’s Arthur Cox, to negotiate the loans. Ó Ríordáin has represented the government since the banking crisis hit in 2008, advising on the creation of the National Asset Management Agency to buy bad loans and the nationalization of the Anglo Irish Bank Corporation Limited. In November, during what Ó Ríordáin calls an “intense ten days,” he negotiated separate deals with lenders that include the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Sweden. “This is more of a refinancing,” he says. “It’s not a bailout insofar as people are writing us checks. These are loans.”
Litigator in the Spotlight: In 2007 a federal jury convicted former Network Associates, Inc., CFO Prabhat Goyal of fraudulently overstating company revenues by $470 million. But in December Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr’s Seth Waxman secured a reversal of Goyal’s conviction, after convincing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that prosecutors, who called no accounting experts to testify, had failed to prove their case. “This is not the way criminal law is supposed to work,” wrote chief judge Alex Kozinski. “I revere the Department of Justice,” says Waxman, “but in this case I just felt that a very great injustice had been done.”
