The 2007 (Summer)
LAWDRAGONLAWDRAGON 500 500LEADING DEALMAKERS IN AMERICA w B Y K ATRINA D EWEY e fter a second-year summer stint review with Manufacturers Hanover financ- at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton ings. Within a year, he was on the team han- & Garrison in 1979, Robert Spatt dling Seagrams’ multi-billion dollar hostile A was ready to take the New York bids for St. Joe Minerals Corp. and then for law scene by storm. Conoco against DuPont. Beware the bite of First, though, there was the matter of rent the M&A bug. to pay on an overpriced New York apart- A few more years and Spatt, as an associate ment. He and his high school sweetheart, representing the financial advisor, was part of Lisa, had married before his third year at watershed deals in M&A’s early history, Michigan Law School, and after graduation including the Texaco battle with Pennzoil to had leased a small three-room apartment buy Getty Oil and the Allied/Bendix/Martin opposite Lincoln Center. Marietta “Pac-Man” deal. Small space, killer view. The first billion-dollar leveraged buyout? His classmates took the summer off to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.’s 1984 acqui- study for the bar exam, and maybe climb sition of Wometco, a diversified company the Alps, while Rob and Lisa took a week to whose holdings included cable operations move from Ann Arbor, Mich., to New York. and other media. At birth, Spatt’s son Mark The next Monday, Spatt reported to work was given an infant t-shirt, ‘Wometco Kid,’ at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, juggling bar commemorating his father’s Lamaze lapses.
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