Many corporate lawyers will have had a snigger at the misfortune faced by Photobition and its advisers, including Pritchard Englefield, during the printing company’s on-going £83m hostile bid for digital imaging company Wace.
Photobition first had to tell shareholders that the code names – so beloved of financial advisers and others – for the two companies, ‘Pyrotechnic’ and ‘Wild’, had, because of printing problems, been mistakenly included in parts of the offer document. The takeover panel then told the company to issue a five-page correction to clarify graphs in the offer document.
But given the ever-increasing size and complexity of these documents and the time pressures involved in bids, those same corporate lawyers will be thinking ‘There but for the grace of God, go I’.
Dentons’ diplomacy pays off
One of the reasons behind Denton Hall’s decision to pull out of its tripartite talks with Richards Butler (RB) and Theodore Goddard (TG) last October was the uncertain post-merger fate of the French firm in its Denton International network, Sales Vincent.
Casting Sales Vincent off because RB already had a Paris office and TG had its own links with Klein Goddard, another Paris firm, would have sent the wrong signal to the remaining five European firms in Denton International, a network in which the firm has invested a great deal of time and effort.
Dentons’ decision looks to have been vindicated, judging by the international reach required to advise The Associates, the US finance company, on the UK and European law aspects of its $3.9bn purchase of Avco Financial Services (see Deals, page 34). With many senior partners scrambling around Europe this year in a bid to link up with the reducing number of quality firms available, Dentons may be a step ahead.
