Our joint venture practice is comprised of an interdisciplinary group of attorneys experienced in corporate, tax and competition law as they relate to joint venture entities and other business relationships between companies. These ventures run the gamut from informal relationships such as joint marketing arrangements among companies with complementary products, to joint R&D projects, to full service businesses. A joint venture requires the corporate expertise needed for an M&A transaction, the tax expertise needed to structure an M&A transaction as well as to plan for ongoing business operations, and the competition expertise needed to determine whether there are anticompetitive issues raised by the venture, especially if competitors are involved. Equally as important, however, the attorneys must bring to the transaction the business acumen to understand that the joint venture documentation is effectively a blueprint that will allow the venture to operate on an ongoing basis. It is this ongoing operation that is the primary characteristic that distinguishes a joint venture from other M&A transactions. While in most M&A transactions the relationship between the parties terminates at closing, in a joint venture the closing is the beginning of the relationship.
Examples of some joint venture transactions in which our attorneys have played a significant role are the following:
- Represented a group of 13 major airlines in the formation and operation of Aeroxchange Ltd., a B2B providing products and services related to supply chain management in the aviation industry;
- Represented Abitibi Consolidated in the formation and operation of PanAsia Paper Company.
