For three days in September, about 100 lawyers, bankers, and executives gathered in New York to take the knife to another part of Nortel Networks Corporation. Once one of the biggest telecoms in North America, Toronto-based Nortel has been slowly selling off its parts since declaring bankruptcy last January. The auction for the company’s enterprise solutions unit started at 10 a.m. on Friday, September 11. Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, Nortel’s U.S. counsel, held the sale at its lower Manhattan offices, across the street from the World Trade Center site. While the participants took a few short breaks, for the most part they worked through the weekend until finally, at 2:30 a.m. on Monday, New Jersey–based Avaya Inc. won the unit with a $900 million bid.
Law firms often find themselves hosting slumber parties in the middle of complex deals, and Cleary’s auction was no exception. “There are very incriminating pictures of me and other people sleeping wherever we could find a spot,” jokes Derrick Tay, a partner at Toronto-based Ogilvy Renault, Nortel’s lead Canadian counsel. “It went on for hours and hours.”
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