Overview

Technology is at the heart of growth and innovation strategies for all companies. Achieving growth and innovation through technology often requires collaboration with one or more outside parties. Outside parties often have divergent interests, however, and collaborations often fail at inception because the parties cannot see a way forward past the various legal, regulatory or commercial hurdles.

Mayer Brown helps clients find solutions that allow them to execute complex and strategically important collaborations, consortiums, alliances and joint ventures in order to achieve their business objectives. To do this, Mayer Brown lawyers work to gain a deep understanding early of the underlying business goals and objectives for any collaboration. With those in mind, Mayer Brown helps to optimize the contract structure and define and document key requirements that will determine success for the collaboration, including how to govern the unique relationship, the rights and obligations regarding development and use of intellectual property, the roles and responsibilities vis-à-vis end customers, and the appropriate allocation of legal, regulatory and compliance obligations for each party.

Our market experience and knowledge allow us to identify and solve complex issues pragmatically before they can torpedo what would otherwise be a mutually beneficial relationship. We have particular experience finding innovative solutions for ground-breaking collaborations, applying prior learnings and a problem solving approach to guide the parties to a mutually beneficial outcome.
We work hand-in-hand with our clients, providing the support they need at the stages they need it, so that they can set up, negotiate and execute these complex, strategic transactions.

We are top-ranked by the most respected legal ranking services for our work. Most relevant, here, is that we are one of only two groups with a Bank 1 ranking in the USA Technology list in Chambers USA and Legal 500 has awarded us its top ranking in the US IT/Outsourcing for as long as the category has existed.

Experience

Select experience includes:

Blackboard, Inc., an education technology company, in the sale of its Blackboard Open LMS business to Learning Technologies Group plc.
CDK Global, Inc., a leading provider of dealer management systems and integrated information technology solutions to the automotive retailing and adjacent industries, in the $1.45 billion sale of its CDK international segment to private equity firm Francisco Partners Management, L.P.
Envestnet in its $660m acquisition of Yodlee, Inc., a leading technology and applications platform providing cloud-based financial services.
Global bank and financial services company in negotiating a loan origination services agreement with fintech Avant, LLC, a leading online marketplace lending company. The transaction included customization and implementation of a white-labeled version of Avant's Amount lending platform for our client. The platform allows the bank to leverage the Amount platform’s proprietary account verification, risk assessment, marketing and full lifecycle customer service tools and machine learning fraud prevention capabilities.
Leading financial group in the negotiation of a multi-year agreement opposite FIS for the licensing, development, implementation and hosting of a core banking cloud platform for our client’s consumer and commercial banking divisions. The transaction included advice on contract negotiations, structure, bank regulatory issues and the accompanying implementation agreements with Wipro and IBM.
Major lending and finance company regarding the creation of an “open” multi-lender platform using proprietary technology for consumer credit decisions. This representation involved creating and negotiating platform participation agreements for participating lenders, credit unions and electronic delivery providers.
Northern Trust in its equity investment in Equity Data Science, Inc., a cloud-based analytics platform that provides decision support tools to asset managers.
OpenCloud Limited in its sale to Metaswitch Networks Ltd., a leading cloud native communications software company.
Wolters Kluwer in its $280 million acquisition of eOriginal, Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based digital lending software, from private equity firm LLR Partners Inc.
Yum! Brands, Inc. in its entry into an agreement with Grubhub, Inc. (including a $200m purchase of Grubhub stock) aimed at driving online sales and delivery for Yum’s restaurants, including Taco Bell and KFC.