New York-based AOL Inc. has been all about the deals in recent years, and its Dulles, Va.-area legal department has been the engine behind them. Led by Julie Jacobs, general counsel and executive vice president for business development, AOL’s 50-attorney department is one of the busiest deal-making shops in new media but its workload went well beyond mergers and acquisitions in 2012.
Jacobs’ department followed its 2009 spinoff from Time Warner Inc. and its 2011 purchase of The Huffington Post by repelling a proxy battle, restructuring its chief executive officer’s pay package, beating Huffington Post‘s unpaid bloggers in federal court and scoring a $1.1 billion patent deal with Microsoft Corp. that put sorely needed cash in its coffers. For all its work in 2012, AOL’s legal department won a number of prominent awards, including the Washington Metropolitan Area Corporate Counsel Association’s outstanding law department award and Corporate Secretary’s Governance Professional of the Year Award for deputy general counsel Damien Atkins for his work on the proxy and executive pay issues. Jacobs’ attorneys are located in Dulles plus London, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco.
