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Olin Corp. and Huntsman Corp. announced June 16 that they have merged in an all-stock deal that creates a chemicals company with more than $12 billion in annual sales.
Kirkland, Cravath and Sidley advised on the transaction.
Yum! Brands has agreed to sell Pizza Hut to Connecticut private equity firm LongRange Capital for about $1.5 billion, with an earn-out option of $75 million by 2030, while Pizza Hut in mainland China will be acquired by Yum China Holdings for about $1.2 billion.
Sidley, Weil and Mayer Brown are serving as outside legal advisors.
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher confirmed in a news release on Thursday afternoon that the firm is the lead counsel to SpaceX on its initial public offering set to price Friday and revealed the lawyers involved across the entire transaction. (Photo credit: Sharon Ferranti/Texas Lawbook)
Melissa Kalka once imagined herself in a white dentist’s coat, peering into mouths across bicuspids and middle molars.
Instead, now she examines balance and term sheets, drilling into multibillion‑dollar deals for hidden risk and opportunity. A transactional partner at the richest law firm in the world, she has become one of the firm’s go‑to architects for complex, capital‑intensive energy and infrastructure deals.
The Texas Lawbook caught up with her about her upbringing and career and the deals she's leading now.
Houston-based Fertitta Entertainment added significantly to its gambling and hospitality holdings Thursday, cutting a long-rumored deal for Caesars Entertainment for $17.6 billion in cash and assumption of debt. Guided by general counsel Steven Scheinthal, Fertitta chose White & Case as outside counsel. Caesars tapped both Latham & Watkins and Skadden Arps. Coincidentally, Scheinthal (pictured) is being honored Thursday night by the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook with the 2026 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for General Counsel of the Year for a Midsized Legal Department. The Lawbook's Jason Philyaw has more on the deal and the more than 70 lawyers involved.
Dan Hoverman built his career by understanding the law and succeeding in high finance, but the Texas Capital executive insists it was never the product of a master plan so much as a habit of following the right mentors at the right moments.
The Texas Lawbook recently sat down with the Kirkland alum to discuss his unique career path, his sports career, the dealmaking environment in Texas and more.
Elon Musk's SpaceX filed a Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday for a much-anticipated initial public offering of its common stock that will trade on Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas under the symbol "SPCX."
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher is advising SpaceX led by capital markets partners George Sampas in New York and Hillary Holmes, Harrison Tucker and Atma Kabad in Houston. Davis Polk is advising the underwriters.
Even if the Securities and Exchange Commission gives public companies permission to report less often, will investors, analysts and lenders actually let them? That is the central question raised by the Commission’s May 5 proposal to allow U.S. public companies to replace quarterly Form 10-Q filings with semiannual reports on a new Form 10-S — the most significant proposed change to the periodic reporting framework since quarterly reporting became mandatory in 1970.
For the week ended May 9, the CDT Roundup is reporting 21 deals valued at nearly $11.3 billion. And that doesn't include a $3.25 billion notes offering that closed three weeks ago nor the $56 billion unsolicitied offer for eBay by $11 billion-market-cap GameStop scooped by The Wall Street Journal last week.
White & Case is advising Grapevine-based GameStop, with a team led from New York. GameStop's general counsel is Mark Robinson, who received the 2023 DFW Corporate Counsel Award for General Counsel of the Year for a Small Legal Department.
That and more in this edition of CDT Roundup.
For the week ended April 25, the Roundup reported on 11 deals worth about $19.7 billion, or maybe $69.7 billion, depending on how SpaceX's latest acquisition pans out.
Aside from the SpaceX rent-to-own deal this week's slate of transactions includes the acquisition of a Brazilian Rare Earth source with a 15-year offtake agreement with the U.S.-backed buyer already in place; a $1.5 billion investment in a REIT that specializes in communications towers; the reverse-merger of an offshore oil services firm with a Houston-based competitor; the acquisition of a fiber provider in Alaska; the sale of a compression services provider to a Lubbock firm and the sale of a minority stake in a hyperscale data center developer.
That and more in this edition of CDT Roundup.
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