Go with MoFo

You lawyers in the audience may be curious to hear which law firms are representing which potential owners’ groups in the sale of the Chicago Cubs. If so, AmLaw Daily has you covered:

Jeffrey Samuels, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets, but over the next few months he’ll be focused on another national league team: the Chicago Cubs. That’s because Samuels and his partner, Paul Ginsberg (a Yankee fan, he says), are advising private equity giant Clarion Capital Partners (headed by Marc Utay) in the company’s bid for America’s most lovable losers . . .Samuels says Leonard Baxt of Dow Lohnes in Washington, D.C. is also advising Utay;

A source familiar with the proposals says that Morrison & Foerster is representing a second potential ownership group, this one led by Tom Ricketts, current head of the Chicago investment bank Incapital.

The third finalist is said to be Hersch Klaff, a Chicago real estate magnate. It is unclear who might be advising Klaff in his bid for the Cubs.

OK, two out of three ain’t bad. Especially when one of the two is Morrison & Foerster who, for those of you don’t know, has represented numerous current ownership groups in various bits of business and litigation over the years, and who has also served as baseball’s bad cop in representing MLB’s licensing arm, Major League Baseball Properties, Inc. as it goes after trademark infringers. It was in this latter capacity that, back in 2002, MoFo sent out a bunch of cool cease and desist letters (like this one) to bloggers who dared use team logos in their posts. I don’t hear much about that sort of thing anymore, probably because MLB figured out that you don’t want to threaten the people who give you free advertising.

Anyway, all good lawyers know the old maxim about how it’s great to know the law, but it’s better to know the judge. With respect to the sale of the Cubs, Major League Baseball and the other owners are the judge. Morrison & Forester knows them well. This, I think, bodes pretty well for Mr. Ricketts.