M&A Lawyer Leaving Paul Weiss to Be an Entrepreneur at 67

Toby Myerson, a longtime corporate partner with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, is launching a business advisory boutique in New York.

The new firm, which will open in January, will be called Longsight Strategic Advisors LLC and advise corporate executives and boards on governance matters, crisis management and transactions.

Myerson, 67, worked with Paul Weiss for his 35-year legal career, except for a brief stint from 1989 to 1990 when he was managing director with Wasserstein Perella, the boutique investment bank.

In an interview, Myerson said he was recently offered a seat on a large cap company board, which he declined to identify. But he said other factors outside of the opportunity led to his decision to launch Longsight Strategic Advisors. [Paul Weiss does not let its partners sit on company boards to steer clear of conflicts of interest.]

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“You get to a certain age, and you sort of think... if you want to be an entrepreneur and start a new business at some point, you say, ‘Let’s get on with it,’” he said.

While at Paul Weiss, Myerson advised Nextel Communications in its $30 billion merger with Sprint Corporation in 2004, and, more recently, EXOR S.p.A., the Agnelli family holding company, in its $6.9 billion unsolicited takeover of PartnerRe, completed this year.

Myerson also represented Citigroup in a number of transactions. He advised on more than $35 billion of acquisitions and divestitures, including Citi’s $14 billion cash and stock acquisition of Nikko Cordial Corporation, according to Paul Weiss.

Myerson said that “there’s no magic to the timing” to his exit and that Paul Weiss’s 2016 corporate hires of Scott Barshay, a top M&A partner from Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and Charles “Rick” Rule from Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, were not related to his move.

“There are no dots to connect there,” said Myerson. “It’s really my comfort level of where we are in the market and where we are headed.”

Myerson pointed to the firm’s growth in its corporate practice — naming Rule and Barshay’s additions — as developments that gave him the “comfort level” to leave the firm. He said there is now a better balance between the firm’s litigation and corporate practice.

“Image tends to lag reality,” said Myerson. “The image of the old days was that the most well-known part of the firm was litigation. I think there is now a great balance and talent pool [between litigation and corporate].”

He spoke bullishly of Rule and Barhsay. Of Barshay’s move to Paul Weiss, Myerson said: “It’s very unusual for Cravath partners to go to other firms. It’s a validation of our model, for him at age 50 to want to spend the rest of his career with us.”

At Longsight, Myerson said that he hopes to fill a niche in the market of advising corporations on crises and workplace issues.

“For example, you look at corporate crises, be it Mylan, Takata or Wells Fargo... there is a need for someone to sit on the company side, who is helping solve problems. To have someone sitting on the board, saying, ‘These are the regulators you have to deal with, these are the legal and practical concerns you deal with and making sure the right suite of advisors are on the field... I think there is a role to play there.”

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